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My Life and Work

by Henry Ford · English · Gutenberg #7213 · 541,664 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: My Life and Work

Author: Henry Ford
        Samuel Crowther


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7213]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213

Credits: Produced by Marvin Hodges, Tom Allen, Tonya Allen, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, and the DP Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LIFE AND WORK ***




Produced by Marvin Hodges, Tom Allen, Tonya Allen, Eric Eldred,
Charles Franks, and the DP Team




MY LIFE AND WORK

By Henry Ford

In Collaboration With Samuel Crowther




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION--WHAT IS THE IDEA?

I. THE BEGINNING

II. WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT BUSINESS

III. STARTING THE REAL BUSINESS

IV. THE SECRET OF MANUFACTURING AND SERVING

V. GETTING INTO PRODUCTION

VI. MACHINES AND MEN

VII. THE TERROR OF THE MACHINE.

VIII. WAGES

IX. WHY NOT ALWAYS HAVE GOOD BUSINESS?

X. HOW CHEAPLY CAN THINGS BE MADE?

XI. MONEY AND GOODS

XII. MONEY--MASTER OR SERVANT?

XIII. WHY BE POOR?

XIV. THE TRACTOR AND POWER FARMING

XV. WHY CHARITY?

XVI. THE RAILROADS

XVII. THINGS IN GENERAL

XVIII. DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY

XIX. WHAT WE MAY EXPECT.

INDEX




INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS THE IDEA?


We have only started on our development of our country--we have not as
yet, with all our talk of wonderful progress, done more than scratch the
surface. The progress has been wonderful enough--but when we compare
what we have done with what there is to do, then our past
accomplishments are as nothing. When we consider that more power is used
merely in ploughing the soil than is used in all the industrial
establishments of the country put together, an inkling comes of how much
opportunity there is ahead. And now, with so many countries of the world
in ferment and with so much unrest every where, is an excellent time to
suggest something of the things that may be done in the light of what
has been done.

When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes
up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories
will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields.
And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human
machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know
more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the
mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees,
and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.

I think that we have already done too much toward banishing the pleasant
things from life by thinking that there is some opposition between
living and providing the means of living. We waste so much time and
energy that we have little left over in which to enjoy ourselves.

Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us
free to live. They are but means to an end. For instance, I do not
consider the machines which bear my name simply as machines. If that was
all there was to it I would do something else. I take them as concrete
evidence of the working out of a theory of business, which I hope is
something more than a theory of business--a theory that looks toward
making this world a better place in which to live. The fact that the
commercial success of the Ford Motor Company has been most unusual is
important only because it serves to demonstrate, in a way which no one
can fail to understand, that the theory to date is right. Considered
solely in this light I can criticize the prevailing system of industry
and the organization of money and society from the standpoint of one who
has not been beaten by them. As things are now organized, I could, were
I thinking only selfishly, ask for no change. If I merely want money the
present system is all right; it gives money in plenty to me. But I am
thinking of service. The present system does not permit of the best
service because it encourages every kind of waste--it keeps many men
from getting the full return from service. And it is going nowhere. It
is all a matter of better planning and adjustment.

I have no quarrel with the general attitude of scoffing at new ideas. It
is better to be skeptical of all new ideas and to insist upon being
shown rather than to rush around in a continuous brainstorm after every
new idea. Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance
wheel of civilization. Most of the present acute troubles of the world
arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating
to discover if they are good ideas. An idea is not necessarily good
because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old
idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. Ideas
are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea.
Almost any one can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing
it into a practical product.

I am now most interested in fully demonstrating that the ideas we have
put into practice are capable of the largest application--that they have
nothing peculiarly to do with motor cars or tractors but form something
in the nature of a universal code. I am quite certain that it is the
natural code and I want to demonstrate it so thoroughly that it will be
accepted, not as a new idea, but as a natural code.

The natural thing to do is to work--to recognize that prosperity and
happiness can be obtained only through honest effort. Human ills flow
largely from attempting to escape from this natural course. I have no
suggestion which goes beyond accepting in its fullest this principle of
nature. I take it for granted that we must work. All that we have done
comes as the result of a certain insistence that since we must work it
is better to work intelligently and forehandedly; that the better we do
our work the better off we shall be. All of which I conceive to be
merely elemental common sense.

I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at
reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers.
We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls
himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who
would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the
buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This
sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing.
Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his
zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard all facts.

Since 1914 a great many persons have received brand-new intellectual
outfits. Many are beginning to think for the first time. They opened
their eyes and realized that they were in the world. Then, with a thrill
of independence, they realized that they could look at the world
critically. They did so and found it faulty. The intoxication of
assuming the masterful position of a critic of the social system--which
it is every man's right to assume--is unbalancing at first. The very
young critic is very much unbalanced. He is strongly in favor of wiping
out the old order and starting a new one. They actually managed to start
a new world in Russia. It is there that the work of the world makers can
best be studied. We learn from Russia that it is the minority and not
the majority who determine destructive action. We learn also that while
men may decree social laws in conflict with natural laws, Nature vetoes
those laws more ruthlessly than did the Czars. Nature has vetoed the
whole Soviet Republic. For it sought to deny nature. It denied above all
else the right to the fruits of labour. Some people say, "Russia will
have to go to work," but that does not describe the case. The fact is
that poor Russia is at work, but her work counts for nothing. It is not
free work. In the United States a workman works eight hours a day; in
Russia, he works twelve to fourteen. In the United States, if a workman
wishes to lay off a day or a week, and is able to afford it, there is
nothing to prevent him. In Russia, under Sovietism, the workman goes to
work whether he wants to or not. The freedom of the citizen has
disappeared in the discipline of a prison-like monotony in which all are
treated alike. That is slavery. Freedom is the right to work a decent
length of time and to get a decent living for doing so; to be able to
arrange the little personal details of one's own life. It is the
aggregate of these and many other items of freedom which makes up the
great idealistic Freedom. The minor forms of Freedom lubricate the
everyday life of all of us.

Russia could not get along without intelligence and experience. As soon
as she began to run her factories by committees, they went to rack and
ruin; there was more debate than production. As soon as they threw out
the skilled man, thousands of tons of precious materials were spoiled.
The fanatics talked the people into starvation. The Soviets are now
offering the engineers, the administrators, the foremen and
superintendents, whom at first they drove out, large sums of money if
only they will come back. Bolshevism is now crying for the brains and
experience which it yesterday treated so ruthlessly. All that "reform"
did to Russia was to block production.

There is in this country a sinister element that desires to creep in
between the men who work with their hands and the men who think and plan
for the men who work with their hands. The same influence that drove the
brains, experience, and ability out of Russia is busily engaged in
raising prejudice here. We must not suffer the stranger, the destroyer,
the hater of happy humanity, to divide our people. In unity is American
strength--and freedom. On the other hand, we have a different kind of
reformer who never calls himself one. He is singularly like the radical
reformer. The radical has had no experience and does not want it. The
other class of reformer has had plenty of experience but it does him no
good. I refer to the reactionary--who will be surprised to find himself
put in exactly the same class as the Bolshevist. He wants to go back to
some previous condition, not because it was the best condition, but
because he thinks he knows about that condition.

The one crowd wants to smash up the whole world in order to make a
better one. The other holds the world as so good that it might well be
let stand as it is--and decay. The second notion arises as does the
first--out of not using the eyes to see with. It is perfectly possible
to smash this world, but it is not possible to build a new one. It is
possible to prevent the world from going forward, but it is not possible
then to prevent it from going back--from decaying. It is foolish to
expect that, if everything be overturned, everyone will thereby get
three meals a day. Or, should everything be petrified, that thereby six
per cent, interest may be paid. The trouble is that reformers and
reactionaries alike get away from the realities--from the primary
functions.

One of the counsels of caution is to be very certain that we do not
mistake a reactionary turn for a return of common sense. We have passed
through a period of fireworks of every description, and the making of a
great many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get anywhere. It was
a convention, not a march. Lovely things were said, but when we got home
we found the furnace out. Reactionaries have frequently taken advantage
of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised "the good old
times"--which usually means the bad old abuses--and because they are
perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as "practical men."
Their return to power is often hailed as the return of common sense.

The primary functions are agriculture, manufacture, and transportation.
Community life is impossible without them. They hold the world together.
Raising things, making things, and earning things are as primitive as
human need and yet as modern as anything can be. They are of the essence
of physical life. When they cease, community life ceases. Things do get
out of shape in this present world under the present system, but we may
hope for a betterment if the foundations stand sure. The great delusion
is that one may change the foundation--usurp the part of destiny in the
social process. The foundations of society are the men and means to
_grow_ things, to _make_ things, and to _carry_ things. As long as
agriculture, manufacture, and transportation survive, the world can
survive any economic or social change. As we serve our jobs we serve the
world.

There is plenty of work to do. Business is merely work. Speculation in
things already produced--that is not business. It is just more or less
respectable graft. But it cannot be legislated out of existence. Laws
can do very little. Law never does anything constructive. It can never
be more than a policeman, and so it is a waste of time to look to our
state capitals or to Washington to do that which law was not designed to
do. As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish
special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special
privilege grow. We have had enough of looking to Washington and we have
had enough of legislators--not so much, however, in this as in other
countries--promising laws to do that which laws cannot do.

When you get a whole country--as did ours--thinking that Washington is a
sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence,
you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which
augurs ill for the future. Our help does not come from Washington, but
from ourselves; our help may, however, go to Washington as a sort of
central distribution point where all our efforts are coordinated for the
general good. We may help the Government; the Government cannot help us.
The slogan of "less government in business and more business in
government" is a very good one, not mainly on account of business or
government, but on account of the people. Business is not the reason why
the United States was founded. The Declaration of Independence is not a
business charter, nor is the Constitution of the United States a
commercial schedule. The United States--its land, people, government,
and business--are but methods by which the life of the people is made
worth while. The Government is a servant and never should be anything
but a servant. The moment the people become adjuncts to government, then
the law of retribution begins to work, for such a relation is unnatural,
immoral, and inhuman. We cannot live without business and we cannot live
without government. Business and government are necessary as servants,
like water and grain; as masters they overturn the natural order.

The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is
where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can
promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver. They can juggle
the currencies as they did in Europe (and as bankers the world over do,
as long as they can get the benefit of the juggling) with a patter of
solemn nonsense. But it is work and work alone that can continue to
deliver the goods--and that, down in his heart, is what every man knows.

There is little chance of an intelligent people, such as ours, ruining
the fundamental processes of economic life. Most men know they cannot
get something for nothing. Most men feel--even if they do not know--that
money is not wealth. The ordinary theories which promise everything to
everybody, and demand nothing from anybody, are promptly denied by the
instincts of the ordinary man, even when he does not find reasons
against them. He _knows_ they are wrong. That is enough. The present
order, always clumsy, often stupid, and in many ways imperfect, has this
advantage over any other--it works.

Doubtless our order will merge by degrees into another, and the new one
will also work--but not so much by reason of what it is as by reason of
what men will bring into it. The reason why Bolshevism did not work, and
cannot work, is not economic. It does not matter whether industry is
privately managed or socially controlled; it does not matter whether you
call the workers' share "wages" or "dividends"; it does not matter
whether you regimentalize the people as to food, clothing, and shelter,
or whether you allow them to eat, dress, and live as they like. Those
are mere matters of detail. The incapacity of the Bolshevist leaders is
indicated by the fuss they made over such details. Bolshevism failed
because it was both unnatural and immoral. Our system stands. Is it
wrong? Of course it is wrong, at a thousand points! Is it clumsy? Of
course it is clumsy. By all right and reason it ought to break down. But
it does not--because it is instinct with certain economic and moral
fundamentals.

The economic fundamental is labour. Labour is the human element which
makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. It is men's
labour that makes the harvest what it is. That is the economic
fundamental: every one of us is working with material which we did not
and could not create, but which was presented to us by Nature.

The moral fundamental is man's right in his labour. This is variously
stated. It is sometimes called "the right of property." It is sometimes
masked in the command, "Thou shalt not steal." It is the other man's
right in his property that makes stealing a crime. When a man has earned
his bread, he has a right to that bread. If another steals it, he does
more than steal bread; he invades a sacred human right. If we cannot
produce we cannot have--but some say if we produce it is only for the
capitalists. Capitalists who become such because they provide better
means of production are of the foundation of society. They have really
nothing of their own. They merely manage property for the benefit of
others. Capitalists who become such through trading in money are a
temporarily necessary evil. They may not be evil at all if their money
goes to production. If their money goes to complicating distribution--to
raising barriers between the producer and the consumer--then they are
evil capitalists and they will pass away when money is better adjusted
to work; and money will become better adjusted to work when it is fully
realized that through work and work alone may health, wealth, and
happiness inevitably be secured.

There is no reason why a man who is willing to work should not be able
to work and to receive the full value of his work. There is equally no
reason why a man who can but will not work should not receive the full
value of his services to the community. He should most certainly be
permitted to take away from the community an equivalent of what he
contributes to it. If he contributes nothing he should take away
nothing. He should have the freedom of starvation. We are not getting
anywhere when we insist that every man ought to have more than he
deserves to have--just because some do get more than they deserve to
have.

There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity
in general than to insist that all men are equal. Most certainly all men
are not equal, and any democratic conception which strives to make men
equal is only an effort to block progress. Men cannot be of equal
service. The men of larger ability are less numerous than the men of
smaller ability; it is possible for a mass of the smaller men to pull
the larger ones down--but in so doing they pull themselves down. It is
the larger men who give the leadership to the community and enable the
smaller men to live with less effort.

The conception of democracy which names a leveling-down of ability makes
for waste. No two things in nature are alike. We build our cars
absolutely interchangeable. All parts are as nearly alike as chemical
analysis, the finest machinery, and the finest workmanship can make
them. No fitting of any kind is required, and it would certainly seem
that two Fords standing side by side, looking exactly alike and made so
exactly alike that any part could be taken out of one and put into the
other, would be alike. But they are not. They will have different road
habits. We have men who have driven hundreds, and in some cases
thousands of Fords and they say that no two ever act precisely the
same--that, if they should drive a new car for an hour or even less and
then the car were mixed with a bunch of other new ones, also each driven
for a single hour and under the same conditions, that although they
could not recognize the car they had been driving merely by looking at
it, they could do so by driving it.

I have been speaking in general terms. Let us be more concrete. A man
ought to be able to live on a scale commensurate with the service that
he renders. This is rather a good time to talk about this point, for we
have recently been through a period when the rendering of service was
the last thing that most people thought of. We were getting to a place
where no one cared about costs or service. Orders came without effort.
Whereas once it was the customer who favored the merchant by dealing
with him, conditions changed until it was the merchant who favored the
customer by selling to him. That is bad for business. Monopoly is bad
for business. Profiteering is bad for business. The lack of necessity to
hustle is bad for business. Business is never as healthy as when, like a
chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching for what it gets.
Things were coming too easily. There was a let-down of the principle
that an honest relation ought to obtain between values and prices. The
public no longer had to be "catered to." There was even a "public be
damned" attitude in many places. It was intensely bad for business. Some
men called that abnormal condition "prosperity." It was not prosperity--
it was just a needless money chase. Money chasing is not business.

It is very easy, unless one keeps a plan thoroughly in mind, to get
burdened with money and then, in an effort to make more money, to forget
all about selling to the people what they want. Business on a
money-making basis is most insecure. It is a touch-and-go affair, moving
irregularly and rarely over a term of years amounting to much. It is the
function of business to produce for consumption and not for money or
speculation. Producing for consumption implies that the quality of the
article produced will be high and that the price will be low--that the
article be one which serves the people and not merely the producer. If
the money feature is twisted out of its proper perspective, then the
production will be twisted to serve the producer.

The producer depends for his prosperity upon serving the people. He may
get by for a while serving himself, but if he does, it will be purely
accidental, and when the people wake up to the fact that they are not
being served, the end of that producer is in sight. During the boom
period the larger effort of production was to serve itself and hence,
the moment the people woke up, many producers went to smash. They said
that they had entered into a "period of depression." Really they had
not. They were simply trying to pit nonsense against sense which is
something that cannot successfully be done. Being greedy for money is
the surest way not to get it, but when one serves for the sake of
service--for the satisfaction of doing that which one believes to be
right--then money abundantly takes care of itself.

Money comes naturally as the result of service. And it is absolutely
necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of
money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service. In my
mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. None of us has any
right to ease. There is no place in civilization for the idler. Any
scheme looking to abolishing money is only making affairs more complex,
for we must have a measure. That our present system of money is a
satisfactory basis for exchange is a matter of grave doubt. That is a
question which I shall talk of in a subsequent chapter. The gist of my
objection to the present monetary system is that it tends to become a
thing of itself and to block instead of facilitate production.

My effort is in the direction of simplicity. People in general have so
little and it costs so much to buy even the barest necessities (let
alone that share of the luxuries to which I think everyone is entitled)
because nearly everything that we make is much more complex than it
needs to be. Our clothing, our food, our household furnishings--all
could be much simpler than they now are and at the same time be better
looking. Things in past ages were made in certain ways and makers since
then have just followed.

I do not mean that we should adopt freak styles. There is no necessity
for that Clothing need not be a bag with a hole cut in it. That might be
easy to make but it would be inconvenient to wear. A blanket does not
require much tailoring, but none of us could get much work done if we
went around Indian-fashion in blankets. Real simplicity means that which
gives the very best service and is the most convenient in use. The
trouble with drastic reforms is they always insist that a man be made
over in order to use certain designed articles. I think that dress
reform for women--which seems to mean ugly clothes--must always
originate with plain women who want to make everyone else look plain.
That is not the right process. Start with an article that suits and then
study to find some way of eliminating the entirely useless parts. This
applies to everything--a shoe, a dress, a house, a piece of machinery, a
railroad, a steamship, an airplane. As we cut out useless parts and
simplify necessary ones we also cut down the cost of making. This is
simple logic, but oddly enough the ordinary process starts with a
cheapening of the manufacturing instead of with a simplifying of the
article. The start ought to be with the article. First we ought to find
whether it is as well made as it should be--does it give the best
possible service? Then--are the materials the best or merely the most
expensive? Then--can its complexity and weight be cut down? And so on.

There is no more sense in having extra weight in an article than there
is in the cockade on a coachman's hat. In fact, there is not as much.
For the cockade may help the coachman to identify his hat while the
extra weight means only a waste of strength. I cannot imagine where the
delusion that weight means strength came from. It is all well enough in
a pile-driver, but why move a heavy weight if we are not going to hit
anything with it? In transportation why put extra weight in a machine?
Why not add it to the load that the machine is designed to carry? Fat
men cannot run as fast as thin men but we build most of our vehicles as
though dead-weight fat increased speed! A deal of poverty grows out of
the carriage of excess weight. Some day we shall discover how further to
eliminate weight. Take wood, for example. For certain purposes wood is
now the best substance we know, but wood is extremely wasteful. The wood
in a Ford car contains thirty pounds of water. There must be some way of
doing better than that. There must be some method by which we can gain
the same strength and elasticity without having to lug useless weight.
And so through a thousand processes.

The farmer makes too complex an affair out of his daily work. I believe
that the average farmer puts to a really useful purpose only about 5 per
cent of the energy that he spends. If any one ever equipped a factory in
the style, say, the average farm is fitted out, the place would be
cluttered with men. The worst factory in Europe is hardly as bad as the
average farm barn. Power is utilized to the least possible degree. Not
only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to
logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a
rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of
putting in a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra
work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into
improvements as an expense. Farm products at their lowest prices are
dearer than they ought to be. Farm profits at their highest are lower
than they ought to be. It is waste motion--waste effort--that makes farm
prices high and profits low.

On my own farm at Dearborn we do everything by machinery. We have
eliminated a great number of wastes, but we have not as yet touched on
real economy. We have not yet been able to put in five or ten years of
intense night-and-day study to discover what really ought to be done. We
have left more undone than we have done. Yet at no time--no matter what
the value of crops--have we failed to turn a first-class profit. We are
not farmers--we are industrialists on the farm. The moment the farmer
considers himself as an industrialist, with a horror of waste either in
material or in men, then we are going to have farm products so
low-priced that all will have enough to eat, and the profits will be so
satisfactory that farming will be considered as among the least
hazardous and most profitable of occupations.

Lack of knowledge of what is going on and lack of knowledge of what the
job really is and the best way of doing it are the reasons why farming
is thought not to pay. Nothing could pay the way farming is conducted.
The farmer follows luck and his forefathers. He does not know how
economically to produce, and he does not know how to market. A
manufacturer who knew how neither to produce nor to market would not
long stay in business. That the farmer can stay on shows how wonderfully
profitable farming can be.

The way to attain low-priced, high-volume production in the factory or
on the farm--and low-priced, high-volume production means plenty for
everyone--is quite simple. The trouble is that the general tendency is
to complicate very simple affairs. Take, for an instance, an
"improvement."

When we talk about improvements usually we have in mind some change in a
product. An "improved" product is one that has been changed. That is not
my idea. I do not believe in starting to make until I have discovered
the best possible thing. This, of course, does not mean that a product
should never be changed, but I think that it will be found more
economical in the end not even to try to produce an article until you
have fully satisfied yourself that utility, design, and material are the
best. If your researches do not give you that confidence, then keep
right on searching until you find confidence. The place to start
manufacturing is with the article. The factory, the organization, the
selling, and the financial plans will shape themselves to the article.
You will have a cutting, edge on your business chisel and in the end you
will save time. Rushing into manufacturing without being certain of the
product is the unrecognized cause of many business failures. People seem
to think that the big thing is the factory or the store or the financial
backing or the management. The big thing is the product, and any hurry
in getting into fabrication before designs are completed is just so much
waste time. I spent twelve years before I had a Model T--which is what
is known to-day as the Ford car--that suited me. We did not attempt to
go into real production until we had a real product. That product has
not been essentially changed.

We are constantly experimenting with new ideas. If you travel the roads
in the neighbourhood of Dearborn you can find all sorts of models of
Ford cars. They are experimental cars--they are not new models. I do not
believe in letting any good idea get by me, but I will not quickly
decide whether an idea is good or bad. If an idea seems good or seems
even to have possibilities, I believe in doing whatever is necessary to
test out the idea from every angle. But testing out the idea is
something very different from making a change in the car. Where most
manufacturers find themselves quicker to make a change in the product
than in the method of manufacturing--we follow exactly the opposite
course.

Our big changes have been in methods of manufacturing. They never stand
still. I believe that there is hardly a single operation in the making
of our car that is the same as when we made our first car of the present
model. That is why we make them so cheaply. The few changes that have
been made in the car have been in the direction of convenience in use or
where we found that a change in design might give added strength. The
materials in the car change as we learn more and more about materials.
Also we do not want to be held up in production or have the expense of
production increased by any possible shortage in a particular material,
so we have for most parts worked out substitute materials. Vanadium
steel, for instance, is our principal steel. With it we can get the
greatest strength with the least weight, but it would not be good
business to let our whole future depend upon being able to get vanadium
steel. We have worked out a substitute. All our steels are special, but
for every one of them we have at least one, and sometimes several, fully
proved and tested substitutes. And so on through all of our materials
and likewise with our parts. In the beginning we made very few of our
parts and none of our motors. Now we make all our motors and most of our
parts because we find it cheaper to do so. But also we aim to make some
of every part so that we cannot be caught in any market emergency or be
crippled by some outside manufacturer being unable to fill his orders.
The prices on glass were run up outrageously high during the war; we are
among the largest users of glass in the country. Now we are putting up
our own glass factory. If we had devoted all of this energy to making
changes in the product we should be nowhere; but by not changing the
product we are able to give our energy to the improvement of the making.

The principal part of a chisel is the cutting edge. If there is a single
principle on which our business rests it is that. It makes no difference
how finely made a chisel is or what splendid steel it has in it or how
well it is forged--if it has no cutting edge it is not a chisel. It is
just a piece of metal. All of which being translated means that it is
what a thing does--not what it is supposed to do--that matters. What is
the use of putting a tremendous force behind a blunt chisel if a light
blow on a sharp chisel will do the work? The chisel is there to cut, not
to be hammered. The hammering is only incidental to the job. So if we
want to work why not concentrate on the work and do it in the quickest
possible fashion? The cutting edge of merchandising is the point where
the product touches the consumer. An unsatisfactory product is one that
has a dull cutting edge. A lot of waste effort is needed to put it
through. The cutting edge of a factory is the man and the machine on the
job. If the man is not right the machine cannot be; if the machine is
not right the man cannot be. For any one to be required to use more
force than is absolutely necessary for the job in hand is waste.

The essence of my idea then is that waste and greed block the delivery
of true service. Both waste and greed are unnecessary. Waste is due
largely to not understanding what one does, or being careless in doing
of it. Greed is merely a species of nearsightedness. I have striven
toward manufacturing with a minimum of waste, both of materials and of
human effort, and then toward distribution at a minimum of profit,
depending for the total profit upon the volume of distribution. In the
process of manufacturing I want to distribute the maximum of wage--that
is, the maximum of buying power. Since also this makes for a minimum
cost and we sell at a minimum profit, we can distribute a product in
consonance with buying power. Thus everyone who is connected with
us--either as a manager, worker, or purchaser--is the better for our
existence. The institution that we have erected is performing a service.
That is the only reason I have for talking about it. The principles of
that service are these:

1. An absence of fear of the future and of veneration for the past. One
who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure
is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no
disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What
is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.

2. A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the
one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another
man--criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the
condition of one's fellow man--to rule by force instead of by
intelligence.

3. The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business
cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit.
Well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but
profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It
cannot be the basis--it must be the result of service.

4. Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is the process
of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of
cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving
it to the consumer. Gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing, tend only
to clog this progression.

How all of this arose, how it has worked out, and how it applies
generally are the subjects of these chapters.




CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF BUSINESS


On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It
is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on
thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the
spring of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to Dearborn and
they always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world
in the appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in
construction and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously
alike--except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have
not yet quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy,
even though it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour
and run sixty miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and
is as good to-day as the day it was built. The development in methods of
manufacture and in materials has been greater than the development in
basic design. The whole design has been refined; the present Ford car,
which is the "Model T," has four cylinders and a self starter--it is in
every way a more convenient and an easier riding car. It is simpler than
the first car. But almost every point in it may be found also in the
first car. The changes have been brought about through experience in the
making and not through any change in the basic principle--which I take
to be an important fact demonstrating that, given a good idea to start
with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around
for a new idea. One idea at a time is about as much as any one can
handle.

It was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to
better transportation. I was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at
Dearborn, Michigan, and my earliest recollection is that, considering
the results, there was too much work on the place. That is the way I
still feel about farming. There is a legend that my parents were very
poor and that the early days were hard ones. Certainly they were not
rich, but neither were they poor. As Michigan farmers went, we were
prosperous. The house in which I was born is still standing, and it and
the farm are part of my present holding.

There was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of
the time. Even when very young I suspected that much might somehow be
done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics--although my
mother always said that I was born a mechanic. I had a kind of workshop
with odds and ends of metal for tools before I had anything else. In
those days we did not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home
made. My toys were all tools--they still are! And every fragment of
machinery was a treasure.

The biggest event of those early years was meeting with a road engine
about eight miles out of Detroit one day when we were driving to town. I
was then twelve years old. The second biggest event was getting a
watch--which happened in the same year. I remember that engine as though
I had seen it only yesterday, for it was the first vehicle other than
horse-drawn that I had ever seen. It was intended primarily for driving
threshing machines and sawmills and was simply a portable engine and
boiler mounted on wheels with a water tank and coal cart trailing
behind. I had seen plenty of these engines hauled around by horses, but
this one had a chain that made a connection between the engine and the
rear wheels of the wagon-like frame on which the boiler was mounted. The
engine was placed over the boiler and one man standing on the platform
behind the boiler shoveled coal, managed the throttle, and did the
steering. It had been made by Nichols, Shepard & Company of Battle
Creek. I found that out at once. The engine had stopped to let us pass
with our horses and I was off the wagon and talking to the engineer
before my father, who was driving, knew what I was up to. The engineer
was very glad to explain the whole affair. He was proud of it. He showed
me how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and a belt
put on to drive other machinery. He told me that the engine made two
hundred revolutions a minute and that the chain pinion could be shifted
to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running. This last is a
feature which, although in different fashion, is incorporated into
modern automobiles. It was not important with steam engines, which are
easily stopped and started, but it became very important with the
gasoline engine. It was that engine which took me into automotive
transportation. I tried to make models of it, and some years later I did
make one that ran very well, but from the time I saw that road engine as
a boy of twelve right forward to to-day, my great interest has been in
making a machine that would travel the roads. Driving to town I always
had a pocket full of trinkets--nuts, washers, and odds and ends of
machinery. Often I took a broken watch and tried to put it together.
When I was thirteen I managed for the first time to put a watch together
so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost
anything in watch repairing--although my tools were of the crudest.
There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with
things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is
made--and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made.
Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas
from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas.

From the beginning I never could work up much interest in the labour of
farming. I wanted to have something to do with machinery. My father was
not entirely in sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. He thought that
I ought to be a farmer. When I left school at seventeen and became an
apprentice in the machine shop of the Drydock Engine Works I was all but
given up for lost. I passed my apprenticeship without trouble--that is,
I was qualified to be a machinist long before my three-year term had
expired--and having a liking for fine work and a leaning toward watches
I worked nights at repairing in a jewelry shop. At one period of those
early days I think that I must have had fully three hundred watches. I
thought that I could build a serviceable watch for around thirty cents
and nearly started in the business. But I did not because I figured out
that watches were not universal necessities, and therefore people
generally would not buy them. Just how I reached that surprising
conclusion I am unable to state. I did not like the ordinary jewelry and
watch making work excepting where the job was hard to do. Even then I
wanted to make something in quantity. It was just about the time when
the standard railroad time was being arranged. We had formerly been on
sun time and for quite a while, just as in our present daylight-saving
days, the railroad time differed from the local time. That bothered me a
good deal and so I succeeded in making a watch that kept both times. It
had two dials and it was quite a curiosity in the neighbourhood.

In 1879--that is, about four years after I first saw that
Nichols-Shepard machine--I managed to get a chance to run one and when
my apprenticeship was over I worked with a local representative of the
Westinghouse Company of Schenectady as an expert in the setting up and
repair of their road engines. The engine they put out was much the same
as the Nichols-Shepard engine excepting that the engine was up in front,
the boiler in the rear, and the power was applied to the back wheels by
a belt. They could make twelve miles an hour on the road even though the
self-propelling feature was only an incident of the construction. They
were sometimes used as tractors to pull heavy loads and, if the owner
also happened to be in the threshing-machine business, he hitched his
threshing machine and other paraphernalia to the engine in moving from
farm to farm. What bothered me was the weight and the cost. They weighed
a couple of tons and were far too expensive to be owned by other than a
farmer with a great deal of land. They were mostly employed by people
who went into threshing as a business or who had sawmills or some other
line that required portable power.

Even before that time I had the idea of making some kind of a light
steam car that would take the place of horses--more especially, however,
as a tractor to attend to the excessively hard labour of ploughing. It
occurred to me, as I remember somewhat vaguely, that precisely the same
idea might be applied to a carriage or a wagon on the road. A horseless
carriage was a common idea. People had been talking about carriages
without horses for many years back--in fact, ever since the steam engine
was invented--but the idea of the carriage at first did not seem so
practical to me as the idea of an engine to do the harder farm work, and
of all the work on the farm ploughing was the hardest. Our roads were
poor and we had not the habit of getting around. One of the most
remarkable features of the automobile on the farm is the way that it has
broadened the farmer's life. We simply took for granted that unless the
errand were urgent we would not go to town, and I think we rarely made
more than a trip a week. In bad weather we did not go even that often.

Being a full-fledged machinist and with a very fair workshop on the farm
it was not difficult for me to build a steam wagon or tractor. In the
building of it came the idea that perhaps it might be made for road use.
I felt perfectly certain that horses, considering all the bother of
attending them and the expense of feeding, did not earn their keep. The
obvious thing to do was to design and build a steam engine that would be
light enough to run an ordinary wagon or to pull a plough. I thought it
more important first to develop the tractor. To lift farm drudgery off
flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant
ambition. It was circumstances that took me first into the actual
manufacture of road cars. I found eventually that people were more
interested in something that would travel on the road than in something
that would do the work on the farms. In fact, I doubt that the light
farm tractor could have been introduced on the farm had not the farmer
had his eyes opened slowly but surely by the automobile. But that is
getting ahead of the story. I thought the farmer would be more
interested in the tractor.

I built a steam car that ran. It had a kerosene-heated boiler and it
developed plenty of power and a neat control--which is so easy with a
steam throttle. But the boiler was dangerous. To get the requisite power
without too big and heavy a power plant required that the engine work
under high pressure; sitting on a high-pressure steam boiler is not
altogether pleasant. To make it even reasonably safe required an excess
of weight that nullified the economy of the high pressure. For two years
I kept experimenting with various sorts of boilers--the engine and
control problems were simple enough--and then I definitely abandoned the
whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam. I knew that in England
they had what amounted to locomotives running on the roads hauling lines
of trailers and also there was no difficulty in designing a big steam
tractor for use on a large farm. But ours were not then English roads;
they would have stalled or racked to pieces the strongest and heaviest
road tractor. And anyway the manufacturing of a big tractor which only a
few wealthy farmers could buy did not seem to me worth while.

But I did not give up the idea of a horseless carriage. The work with
the Westinghouse representative only served to confirm the opinion I had
formed that steam was not suitable for light vehicles. That is why I
stayed only a year with that company. There was nothing more that the
big steam tractors and engines could teach me and I did not want to
waste time on something that would lead nowhere. A few years before--it
was while I was an apprentice--I read in the _World of Science_, an
English publication, of the "silent gas engine" which was then coming
out in England. I think it was the Otto engine. It ran with illuminating
gas, had a single large cylinder, and the power impulses being thus
intermittent required an extremely heavy fly-wheel. As far as weight was
concerned it gave nothing like the power per pound of metal that a steam
engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to dismiss it as
even a possibility for road use. It was interesting to me only as all
machinery was interesting. I followed in the English and American
magazines which we got in the shop the development of the engine and
most particularly the hints of the possible replacement of the
illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by the vaporization of gasoline.
The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time
that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market.
They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not
recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could
ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated
conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never
thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way
with wise people--they are so wise and practical that they always know
to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the
limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever
I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition
with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure
they would do little work.

The gas engine interested me and I followed its progress, but only from
curiosity, until about 1885 or 1886 when, the steam engine being
discarded as the motive power for the carriage that I intended some day
to build, I had to look around for another sort of motive power. In 1885
I repaired an Otto engine at the Eagle Iron Works in Detroit. No one in
town knew anything about them. There was a rumour that I did and,
although I had never before been in contact with one, I undertook and
carried through the job. That gave me a chance to study the new engine
at first hand and in 1887 I built one on the Otto four-cycle model just
to see if I understood the principles. "Four cycle" means that the
piston traverses the cylinder four times to get one power impulse. The
first stroke draws in the gas, the second compresses it, the third is
the explosion or power stroke, while the fourth stroke exhausts the
waste gas. The little model worked well enough; it had a one-inch bore
and a three-inch stroke, operated with gasoline, and while it did not
develop much power, it was slightly lighter in proportion than the
engines being offered commercially. I gave it away later to a young man
who wanted it for something or other and whose name I have forgotten; it
was eventually destroyed. That was the beginning of the work with the
internal combustion engine.

I was then on the farm to which I had returned, more because I wanted to
experiment than because I wanted to farm, and, now being an all-around
machinist, I had a first-class workshop to replace the toy shop of
earlier days. My father offered me forty acres of timber land, provided
I gave up being a machinist. I agreed in a provisional way, for cutting
the timber gave me a chance to get married. I fitted out a sawmill and a
portable engine and started to cut out and saw up the timber on the
tract. Some of the first of that lumber went into a cottage on my new
farm and in it we began our married life. It was not a big
house--thirty-one feet square and only a story and a half high--but it
was a comfortable place. I added to it my workshop, and when I was not
cutting timber I was working on the gas engines--learning what they were
and how they acted. I read everything I could find, but the greatest
knowledge came from the work. A gas engine is a mysterious sort of
thing--it will not always go the way it should. You can imagine how
those first engines acted!

It was in 1890 that I began on a double-cylinder engine. It was quite
impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation
purposes--the fly-wheel had to be entirely too heavy. Between making the
first four-cycle engine of the Otto type and the start on a double
cylinder I had made a great many experimental engines out of tubing. I
fairly knew my way about. The double cylinder I thought could be applied
to a road vehicle and my original idea was to put it on a bicycle with a
direct connection to the crankshaft and allowing for the rear wheel of
the bicycle to act as the balance wheel. The speed was going to be
varied only by the throttle. I never carried out this plan because it
soon became apparent that the engine, gasoline tank, and the various
necessary controls would be entirely too heavy for a bicycle. The plan
of the two opposed cylinders was that, while one would be delivering
power the other would be exhausting. This naturally would not require so
heavy a fly-wheel to even the application of power. The work started in
my shop on the farm. Then I was offered a job with the Detroit Electric
Company as an engineer and machinist at forty-five dollars a month. I
took it because that was more money than the farm was bringing me and I
had decided to get away from farm life anyway. The timber had all been
cut. We rented a house on Bagley Avenue, Detroit. The workshop came
along and I set it up in a brick shed at the back of the house. During
the first several months I was in the night shift at the electric-light
plant--which gave me very little time for experimenting--but after that
I was in the day shift and every night and all of every Saturday night I
worked on the new motor. I cannot say that it was hard work. No work
with interest is ever hard. I always am certain of results. They always
come if you work hard enough. But it was a very great thing to have my
wife even more confident than I was. She has always been that way.

I had to work from the ground up--that is, although I knew that a number
of people were working on horseless carriages, I could not know what
they were doing. The hardest problems to overcome were in the making and
breaking of the spark and in the avoidance of excess weight. For the
transmission, the steering gear, and the general construction, I could
draw on my experience with the steam tractors. In 1892 I completed my
first motor car, but it was not until the spring of the following year
that it ran to my satisfaction. This first car had something of the
appearance of a buggy. There were two cylinders with a two-and-a-half-inch
bore and a six-inch stroke set side by side and over the rear axle. I
made them out of the exhaust pipe of a steam engine that I had bought.
They developed about four horsepower. The power was transmitted from the
motor to the countershaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the
rear wheel by a chain. The car would hold two people, the seat being
suspended on posts and the body on elliptical springs. There were two
speeds--one of ten and the other of twenty miles per hour--obtained by
shifting the belt, which was done by a clutch lever in front of the
driving seat. Thrown forward, the lever put in the high speed; thrown
back, the low speed; with the lever upright the engine could run free.
To start the car it was necessary to turn the motor over by hand with
the clutch free. To stop the car one simply released the clutch and
applied the foot brake. There was no reverse, and speeds other than
those of the belt were obtained by the throttle. I bought the iron work
for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and the springs. The
wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The
balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made and all of the more
delicate mechanism I made myself. One of the features that I discovered
necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be
applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The machine
altogether weighed about five hundred pounds. A tank under the seat held
three gallons of gasoline which was fed to the motor through a small
pipe and a mixing valve. The ignition was by electric spark. The
original machine was air-cooled--or to be more accurate, the motor
simply was not cooled at all. I found that on a run of an hour or more
the motor heated up, and so I very shortly put a water jacket around the
cylinders and piped it to a tank in the rear of the car over the
cylinders. Nearly all of these various features had been planned in
advance. That is the way I have always worked. I draw a plan and work
out every detail on the plan before starting to build. For otherwise one
will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and
the finished article will not have coherence. It will not be rightly
proportioned. Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish
between planning and experimenting. The largest building difficulties
that I had were in obtaining the proper materials. The next were with
tools. There had to be some adjustments and changes in details of the
design, but what held me up most was that I had neither the time nor the
money to search for the best material for each part. But in the spring
of 1893 the machine was running to my partial satisfaction and giving an
opportunity further to test out the design and material on the road.




CHAPTER II

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT BUSINESS


My "gasoline buggy" was the first and for a long time the only
automobile in Detroit. It was considered to be something of a nuisance,
for it made a racket and it scared horses. Also it blocked traffic. For
if I stopped my machine anywhere in town a crowd was around it before I
could start up again. If I left it alone even for a minute some
inquisitive person always tried to run it. Finally, I had to carry a
chain and chain it to a lamp post whenever I left it anywhere. And then
there was trouble with the police. I do not know quite why, for my
impression is that there were no speed-limit laws in those days. Anyway,
I had to get a special permit from the mayor and thus for a time enjoyed
the distinction of being the only licensed chauffeur in America. I ran
that machine about one thousand miles through 1895 and 1896 and then
sold it to Charles Ainsley of Detroit for two hundred dollars. That was
my first sale. I had built the car not to sell but only to experiment
with. I wanted to start another car. Ainsley wanted to buy. I could use
the money and we had no trouble in agreeing upon a price.

It was not at all my idea to make cars in any such petty fashion. I was
looking ahead to production, but before that could come I had to have
something to produce. It does not pay to hurry. I started a second car
in 1896; it was much like the first but a little lighter. It also had
the belt drive which I did not give up until some time later; the belts
were all right excepting in hot weather. That is why I later adopted
gears. I learned a great deal from that car. Others in this country and
abroad were building cars by that time, and in 1895 I heard that a Benz
car from Germany was on exhibition in Macy's store in New York. I
traveled down to look at it but it had no features that seemed worth
while. It also had the belt drive, but it was much heavier than my car.
I was working for lightness; the foreign makers have never seemed to
appreciate what light weight means. I built three cars in all in my home
shop and all of them ran for years in Detroit. I still have the first
car; I bought it back a few years later from a man to whom Mr. Ainsley
had sold it. I paid one hundred dollars for it.

During all this time I kept my position with the electric company and
gradually advanced to chief engineer at a salary of one hundred and
twenty-five dollars a month. But my gas-engine experiments were no more
popular with the president of the company than my first mechanical
leanings were with my father. It was not that my employer objected to
experiments--only to experiments with a gas engine. I can still hear him
say: "Electricity, yes, that's the coming thing. But gas--no."

He had ample grounds for his skepticism--to use the mildest terms.
Practically no one had the remotest notion of the future of the internal
combustion engine, while we were just on the edge of the great
electrical development. As with every comparatively new idea,
electricity was expected to do much more than we even now have any
indication that it can do. I did not see the use of experimenting with
electricity for my purposes. A road car could not run on a trolley even
if trolley wires had been less expensive; no storage battery was in
sight of a weight that was practical. An electrical car had of necessity
to be limited in radius and to contain a large amount of motive
machinery in proportion to the power exerted. That is not to say that I
held or now hold electricity cheaply; we have not yet begun to use
electricity. But it has its place, and the internal combustion engine
has its place. Neither can substitute for the other--which is
exceedingly fortunate.

I have the dynamo that I first had charge of at the Detroit Edison
Company. When I started our Canadian plant I bought it from an office
building to which it had been sold by the electric company, had it
revamped a little, and for several years it gave excellent service in
the Canadian plant. When we had to build a new power plant, owing to the
increase in business, I had the old motor taken out to my museum--a room
out at Dearborn that holds a great number of my mechanical treasures.

The Edison Company offered me the general superintendency of the company
but only on condition that I would give up my gas engine and devote
myself to something really useful. I had to choose between my job and my
automobile. I chose the automobile, or rather I gave up the job--there
was really nothing in the way of a choice. For already I knew that the
car was bound to be a success. I quit my job on August 15, 1899, and
went into the automobile business.

It might be thought something of a step, for I had no personal funds.
What money was left over from living was all used in experimenting. But
my wife agreed that the automobile could not be given up--that we had to
make or break. There was no "demand" for automobiles--there never is for
a new article. They were accepted in much the fashion as was more
recently the airplane. At first the "horseless carriage" was considered
merely a freak notion and many wise people explained with particularity
why it could never be more than a toy. No man of money even thought of
it as a commercial possibility. I cannot imagine why each new means of
transportation meets with such opposition. There are even those to-day
who shake their heads and talk about the luxury of the automobile and
only grudgingly admit that perhaps the motor truck is of some use. But
in the beginning there was hardly any one who sensed that the automobile
could be a large factor in industry. The most optimistic hoped only for
a development akin to that of the bicycle. When it was found that an
automobile really could go and several makers started to put out cars,
the immediate query was as to which would go fastest. It was a curious
but natural development--that racing idea. I never thought anything of
racing, but the public refused to consider the automobile in any light
other than as a fast toy. Therefore later we had to race. The industry
was held back by this initial racing slant, for the attention of the
makers was diverted to making fast rather than good cars. It was a
business for speculators.

A group of men of speculative turn of mind organized, as soon as I left
the electric company, the Detroit Automobile Company to exploit my car.
I was the chief engineer and held a small amount of the stock. For three
years we continued making cars more or less on the model of my first
car. We sold very few of them; I could get no support at all toward
making better cars to be sold to the public at large. The whole thought
was to make to order and to get the largest price possible for each car.
The main idea seemed to be to get the money. And being without authority
other than my engineering position gave me, I found that the new company
was not a vehicle for realizing my ideas but merely a money-making
concern--that did not make much money. In March, 1902, I resigned,
determined never again to put myself under orders. The Detroit
Automobile Company later became the Cadillac Company under the ownership
of the Lelands, who came in subsequently.

I rented a shop--a one-story brick shed--at 81 Park Place to continue my
experiments and to find out what business really was. I thought that it
must be something different from what it had proved to be in my first
adventure.

The year from 1902 until the formation of the Ford Motor Company was
practically one of investigation. In my little one-room brick shop I
worked on the development of a four-cylinder motor and on the outside I
tried to find out what business really was and whether it needed to be
quite so selfish a scramble for money as it seemed to be from my first
short experience. From the period of the first car, which I have
described, until the formation of my present company I built in all
about twenty-five cars, of which nineteen or twenty were built with the
Detroit Automobile Company. The automobile had passed from the initial
stage where the fact that it could run at all was enough, to the stage
where it had to show speed. Alexander Winton of Cleveland, the founder
of the Winton car, was then the track champion of the country and
willing to meet all comers. I designed a two-cylinder enclosed engine of
a more compact type than I had before used, fitted it into a skeleton
chassis, found that I could make speed, and arranged a race with Winton.
We met on the Grosse Point track at Detroit. I beat him. That was my
first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people
cared to read. The public thought nothing of a car unless it made
speed--unless it beat other racing cars. My ambition to build the
fastest car in the world led me to plan a four-cylinder motor. But of
that more later.

The most surprising feature of business as it was conducted was the
large attention given to finance and the small attention to service.
That seemed to me to be reversing the natural process which is that the
money should come as the result of work and not before the work. The
second feature was the general indifference to better methods of
manufacture as long as whatever was done got by and took the money. In
other words, an article apparently was not built with reference to how
greatly it could serve the public but with reference solely to how much
money could be had for it--and that without any particular care whether
the customer was satisfied. To sell him was enough. A dissatisfied
customer was regarded not as a man whose trust had been violated, but
either as a nuisance or as a possible source of more money in fixing up
the work which ought to have been done correctly in the first place. For
instance, in automobiles there was not much concern as to what happened
to the car once it had been sold. How much gasoline it used per mile was
of no great moment; how much service it actually gave did not matter;
and if it broke down and had to have parts replaced, then that was just
hard luck for the owner. It was considered good business to sell parts
at the highest possible price on the theory that, since the man had
already bought the car, he simply had to have the part and would be
willing to pay for it.

The automobile business was not on what I would call an honest basis, to
say nothing of being, from a manufacturing standpoint, on a scientific
basis, but it was no worse than business in general. That was the
period, it may be remembered, in which many corporations were being
floated and financed. The bankers, who before then had confined
themselves to the railroads, got into industry. My idea was then and
still is that if a man did his work well, the price he would get for
that work, the profits and all financial matters, would care for
themselves and that a business ought to start small and build itself up
and out of its earnings. If there are no earnings then that is a signal
to the owner that he is wasting his time and does not belong in that
business. I have never found it necessary to change those ideas, but I
discovered that this simple formula of doing good work and getting paid
for it was supposed to be slow for modern business. The plan at that
time most in favor was to start off with the largest possible
capitalization and then sell all the stock and all the bonds that could
be sold. Whatever money happened to be left over after all the stock and
bond-selling expenses and promoters, charges and all that, went
grudgingly into the foundation of the business. A good business was not
one that did good work and earned a fair profit. A good business was one
that would give the opportunity for the floating of a large amount of
stocks and bonds at high prices. It was the stocks and bonds, not the
work, that mattered. I could not see how a new business or an old
business could be expected to be able to charge into its product a great
big bond interest and then sell the product at a fair price. I have
never been able to see that.

I have never been able to understand on what theory the original
investment of money can be charged against a business. Those men in
business who call themselves financiers say that money is "worth" 6 per
cent, or 5 per cent, or some other per cent, and that if a business has
one hundred thousand dollars invested in it, the man who made the
investment is entitled to charge an interest payment on the money,
because, if instead of putting that money into the business he had put
it into a savings bank or into certain securities, he could have a
certain fixed return. Therefore they say that a proper charge against
the operating expenses of a business is the interest on this money. This
idea is at the root of many business failures and most service failures.
Money is not worth a particular amount. As money it is not worth
anything, for it will do nothing of itself. The only use of money is to
buy tools to work with or the product of tools. Therefore money is worth
what it will help you to produce or buy and no more. If a man thinks
that his money will earn 5 per cent, or 6 per cent, he ought to place it
where he can get that return, but money placed in a business is not a
charge on the business--or, rather, should not be. It ceases to be money
and becomes, or should become, an engine of production, and it is
therefore worth what it produces--and not a fixed sum according to some
scale that has no bearing upon the particular business in which the
money has been placed. Any return should come after it has produced, not
before.

Business men believed that you could do anything by "financing" it. If
it did not go through on the first financing then the idea was to
"refinance." The process of "refinancing" was simply the game of sending
good money after bad. In the majority of cases the need of refinancing
arises from bad management, and the effect of refinancing is simply to
pay the poor managers to keep up their bad management a little longer.
It is merely a postponement of the day of judgment. This makeshift of
refinancing is a device of speculative financiers. Their money is no
good to them unless they can connect it up with a place where real work
is being done, and that they cannot do unless, somehow, that place is
poorly managed. Thus, the speculative financiers delude themselves that
they are putting their money out to use. They are not; they are putting
it out to waste.

I determined absolutely that never would I join a company in which
finance came before the work or in which bankers or financiers had a
part. And further that, if there were no way to get started in the kind
of business that I thought could be managed in the interest of the
public, then I simply would not get started at all. For my own short
experience, together with what I saw going on around me, was quite
enough proof that business as a mere money-making game was not worth
giving much thought to and was distinctly no place for a man who wanted
to accomplish anything. Also it did not seem to me to be the way to make
money. I have yet to have it demonstrated that it is the way. For the
only foundation of real business is service.

A manufacturer is not through with his customer when a sale is
completed. He has then only started with his customer. In the case of an
automobile the sale of the machine is only something in the nature of an
introduction. If the machine does not give service, then it is better
for the manufacturer if he never had the introduction, for he will have
the worst of all advertisements--a dissatisfied customer. There was
something more than a tendency in the early days of the automobile to
regard the selling of a machine as the real accomplishment and that
thereafter it did not matter what happened to the buyer. That is the
shortsighted salesman-on-commission attitude. If a salesman is paid only
for what he sells, it is not to be expected that he is going to exert
any great effort on a customer out of whom no more commission is to be
made. And it is right on this point that we later made the largest
selling argument for the Ford. The price and the quality of the car
would undoubtedly have made a market, and a large market. We went beyond
that. A man who bought one of our cars was in my opinion entitled to
continuous use of that car, and therefore if he had a breakdown of any
kind it was our duty to see that his machine was put into shape again at
the earliest possible moment. In the success of the Ford car the early
provision of service was an outstanding element. Most of the expensive
cars of that period were ill provided with service stations. If your car
broke down you had to depend on the local repair man--when you were
entitled to depend upon the manufacturer. If the local repair man were a
forehanded sort of a person, keeping on hand a good stock of parts
(although on many of the cars the parts were not interchangeable), the
owner was lucky. But if the repair man were a shiftless person, with an
adequate knowledge of automobiles and an inordinate desire to make a
good thing out of every car that came into his place for repairs, then
even a slight breakdown meant weeks of laying up and a whopping big
repair bill that had to be paid before the car could be taken away. The
repair men were for a time the largest menace to the automobile
industry. Even as late as 1910 and 1911 the owner of an automobile was
regarded as essentially a rich man whose money ought to be taken away
from him. We met that situation squarely and at the very beginning. We
would not have our distribution blocked by stupid, greedy men.

That is getting some years ahead of the story, but it is control by
finance that breaks up service because it looks to the immediate dollar.
If the first consideration is to earn a certain amount of money, then,
unless by some stroke of luck matters are going especially well and
there is a surplus over for service so that the operating men may have a
chance, future business has to be sacrificed for the dollar of to-day.

And also I noticed a tendency among many men in business to feel that
their lot was hard--they worked against a day when they might retire and
live on an income--get out of the strife. Life to them was a battle to
be ended as soon as possible. That was another point I could not
understand, for as I reasoned, life is not a battle except with our own
tendency to sag with the downpull of "getting settled." If to petrify is
success all one has to do is to humour the lazy side of the mind but if
to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep
awake all day. I saw great businesses become but the ghost of a name
because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always
managed, and though the management may have been most excellent in its
day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in
slavish following of its yesterdays. Life, as I see it, is not a
location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself "settled"
is not settled--he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and
was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the
street, but it is never the same man who lives there.

And out of the delusion that life is a battle that may be lost by a
false move grows, I have noticed, a great love for regularity. Men fall
into the half-alive habit. Seldom does the cobbler take up with the
new-fangled way of soling shoes, and seldom does the artisan willingly
take up with new methods in his trade. Habit conduces to a certain
inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble. It
will be recalled that when a study was made of shop methods, so that the
workmen might be taught to produce with less useless motion and fatigue,
it was most opposed by the workmen themselves. Though they suspected
that it was simply a game to get more out of them, what most irked them
was that it interfered with the well-worn grooves in which they had
become accustomed to move. Business men go down with their businesses
because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to
change. One sees them all about--men who do not know that yesterday is
past, and who woke up this morning with their last year's ideas. It
could almost be written down as a formula that when a man begins to
think that he has at last found his method he had better begin a most
searching examination of himself to see whether some part of his brain
has not gone to sleep. There is a subtle danger in a man thinking that
he is "fixed" for life. It indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of
progress is going to fling him off.

There is also the great fear of being thought a fool. So many men are
afraid of being considered fools. I grant that public opinion is a
powerful police influence for those who need it. Perhaps it is true that
the majority of men need the restraint of public opinion. Public opinion
may keep a man better than he would otherwise be--if not better morally,
at least better as far as his social desirability is concerned. But it
is not a bad thing to be a fool for righteousness' sake. The best of it
is that such fools usually live long enough to prove that they were not
fools--or the work they have begun lives long enough to prove they were
not foolish.

The money influence--the pressing to make a profit on an
"investment"--and its consequent neglect of or skimping of work and
hence of service showed itself to me in many ways. It seemed to be at
the bottom of most troubles. It was the cause of low wages--for without
well-directed work high wages cannot be paid. And if the whole attention
is not given to the work it cannot be well directed. Most men want to be
free to work; under the system in use they could not be free to work.
During my first experience I was not free--I could not give full play to
my ideas. Everything had to be planned to make money; the last
consideration was the work. And the most curious part of it all was the
insistence that it was the money and not the work that counted. It did
not seem to strike any one as illogical that money should be put ahead
of work--even though everyone had to admit that the profit had to come
from the work. The desire seemed to be to find a short cut to money and
to pass over the obvious short cut--which is through the work.

Take competition; I found that competition was supposed to be a menace
and that a good manager circumvented his competitors by getting a
monopoly through artificial means. The idea was that there were only a
certain number of people who could buy and that it was necessary to get
their trade ahead of someone else. Some will remember that later many of
the automobile manufacturers entered into an association under the
Selden Patent just so that it might be legally possible to control the
price and the output of automobiles. They had the same idea that so many
trades unions have--the ridiculous notion that more profit can be had
doing less work than more. The plan, I believe, is a very antiquated
one. I could not see then and am still unable to see that there is not
always enough for the man who does his work; time spent in fighting
competition is wasted; it had better be spent in doing the work. There
are always enough people ready and anxious to buy, provided you supply
what they want and at the proper price--and this applies to personal
services as well as to goods.

During this time of reflection I was far from idle. We were going ahead
with a four-cylinder motor and the building of a pair of big racing
cars. I had plenty of time, for I never left my business. I do not
believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by
day and dream of it by night. It is nice to plan to do one's work in
office hours, to take up the work in the morning, to drop it in the
evening--and not have a care until the next morning. It is perfectly
possible to do that if one is so constituted as to be willing through
all of his life to accept direction, to be an employee, possibly a
responsible employee, but not a director or manager of anything. A
manual labourer must have a limit on his hours, otherwise he will wear
himself out. If he intends to remain always a manual labourer, then he
should forget about his work when the whistle blows, but if he intends
to go forward and do anything, the whistle is only a signal to start
thinking over the day's work in order to discover how it might be done
better.

The man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who
is bound to succeed. I cannot pretend to say, because I do not know,
whether the man who works always, who never leaves his business, who is
absolutely intent upon getting ahead, and who therefore does get
ahead--is happier than the man who keeps office hours, both for his
brain and his hands. It is not necessary for any one to decide the
question. A ten-horsepower engine will not pull as much as a twenty. The
man who keeps brain office hours limits his horsepower. If he is
satisfied to pull only the load that he has, well and good, that is his
affair--but he must not complain if another who has increased his
horsepower pulls more than he does. Leisure and work bring different
results. If a man wants leisure and gets it--then he has no cause to
complain. But he cannot have both leisure and the results of work.

Concretely, what I most realized about business in that year--and I have
been learning more each year without finding it necessary to change my
first conclusions--is this:

(1) That finance is given a place ahead of work and therefore tends to
kill the work and destroy the fundamental of service.

(2) That thinking first of money instead of work brings on fear of
failure and this fear blocks every avenue of business--it makes a man
afraid of competition, of changing his methods, or of doing anything
which might change his condition.

(3) That the way is clear for any one who thinks first of service--of
doing the work in the best possible way.




CHAPTER III

STARTING THE REAL BUSINESS


In the little brick shop at 81 Park Place I had ample opportunity to
work out the design and some of the methods of manufacture of a new car.
Even if it were possible to organize the exact kind of corporation that
I wanted--one in which doing the work well and suiting the public would
be controlling factors--it became apparent that I never could produce a
thoroughly good motor car that might be sold at a low price under the
existing cut-and-try manufacturing methods.

Everybody knows that it is always possible to do a thing better the
second time. I do not know why manufacturing should not at that time
have generally recognized this as a basic fact--unless it might be that
the manufacturers were in such a hurry to obtain something to sell that
they did not take time for adequate preparation. Making "to order"
instead of making in volume is, I suppose, a habit, a tradition, that
has descended from the old handicraft days. Ask a hundred people how
they want a particular article made. About eighty will not know; they
will leave it to you. Fifteen will think that they must say something,
while five will really have preferences and reasons. The ninety-five,
made up of those who do not know and admit it and the fifteen who do not
know but do not admit it, constitute the real market for any product.
The five who want something special may or may not be able to pay the
price for special work. If they have the price, they can get the work,
but they constitute a special and limited market. Of the ninety-five
perhaps ten or fifteen will pay a price for quality. Of those remaining,
a number will buy solely on price and without regard to quality. Their
numbers are thinning with each day. Buyers are learning how to buy. The
majority will consider quality and buy the biggest dollar's worth of
quality. If, therefore, you discover what will give this 95 per cent. of
people the best all-round service and then arrange to manufacture at the
very highest quality and sell at the very lowest price, you will be
meeting a demand which is so large that it may be called universal.

This is not standardizing. The use of the word "standardizing" is very
apt to lead one into trouble, for it implies a certain freezing of
design and method and usually works out so that the manufacturer selects
whatever article he can the most easily make and sell at the highest
profit. The public is not considered either in the design or in the
price. The thought behind most standardization is to be able to make a
larger profit. The result is that with the economies which are
inevitable if you make only one thing, a larger and larger profit is
continually being had by the manufacturer. His output also becomes
larger--his facilities produce more--and before he knows it his markets
are overflowing with goods which will not sell. These goods would sell
if the manufacturer would take a lower price for them. There is always
buying power present--but that buying power will not always respond to
reductions in price. If an article has been sold at too high a price and
then, because of stagnant business, the price is suddenly cut, the
response is sometimes most disappointing. And for a very good reason.
The public is wary. It thinks that the price-cut is a fake and it sits
around waiting for a real cut. We saw much of that last year. If, on the
contrary, the economies of making are transferred at once to the price
and if it is well known that such is the policy of the manufacturer, the
public will have confidence in him and will respond. They will trust him
to give honest value. So standardization may seem bad business unless it
carries with it the plan of constantly reducing the price at which the
article is sold. And the price has to be reduced (this is very
important) because of the manufacturing economies that have come about
and not because the falling demand by the public indicates that it is
not satisfied with the price. The public should always be wondering how
it is possible to give so much for the money.

Standardization (to use the word as I understand it) is not just taking
one's best selling article and concentrating on it. It is planning day
and night and probably for years, first on something which will best
suit the public and then on how it should be made. The exact processes
of manufacturing will develop of themselves. Then, if we shift the
manufacturing from the profit to the service basis, we shall have a real
business in which the profits will be all that any one could desire.

All of this seems self-evident to me. It is the logical basis of any
business that wants to serve 95 per cent. of the community. It is the
logical way in which the community can serve itself. I cannot comprehend
why all business does not go on this basis. All that has to be done in
order to adopt it is to overcome the habit of grabbing at the nearest
dollar as though it were the only dollar in the world. The habit has
already to an extent been overcome. All the large and successful retail
stores in this country are on the one-price basis. The only further step
required is to throw overboard the idea of pricing on what the traffic
will bear and instead go to the common-sense basis of pricing on what it
costs to manufacture and then reducing the cost of manufacture. If the
design of the product has been sufficiently studied, then changes in it
will come very slowly. But changes in manufacturing processes will come
very rapidly and wholly naturally. That has been our experience in
everything we have undertaken. How naturally it has all come about, I
shall later outline. The point that I wish to impress here is that it is
impossible to get a product on which one may concentrate unless an
unlimited amount of study is given beforehand. It is not just an
afternoon's work.

These ideas were forming with me during this year of experimenting. Most
of the experimenting went into the building of racing cars. The idea in
those days was that a first-class car ought to be a racer. I never
really thought much of racing, but following the bicycle idea, the
manufacturers had the notion that winning a race on a track told the
public something about the merits of an automobile--although I can
hardly imagine any test that would tell less.

But, as the others were doing it, I, too, had to do it. In 1903, with
Tom Cooper, I built two cars solely for speed. They were quite alike.
One we named the "999" and the other the "Arrow." If an automobile were
going to be known for speed, then I was going to make an automobile that
would be known wherever speed was known. These were. I put in four great
big cylinders giving 80 H.P.--which up to that time had been unheard of.
The roar of those cylinders alone was enough to half kill a man. There
was only one seat. One life to a car was enough. I tried out the cars.
Cooper tried out the cars. We let them out at full speed. I cannot quite
describe the sensation. Going over Niagara Falls would have been but a
pastime after a ride in one of them. I did not want to take the
responsibility of racing the "999" which we put up first, neither did
Cooper. Cooper said he knew a man who lived on speed, that nothing could
go too fast for him. He wired to Salt Lake City and on came a
professional bicycle rider named Barney Oldfield. He had never driven a
motor car, but he liked the idea of trying it. He said he would try
anything once.

It took us only a week to teach him how to drive. The man did not know
what fear was. All that he had to learn was how to control the monster.
Controlling the fastest car of to-day was nothing as compared to
controlling that car. The steering wheel had not yet been thought of.
All the previous cars that I had built simply had tillers. On this one I
put a two-handed tiller, for holding the car in line required all the
strength of a strong man. The race for which we were working was at
three miles on the Grosse Point track. We kept our cars as a dark horse.
We left the predictions to the others. The tracks then were not
scientifically banked. It was not known how much speed a motor car could
develop. No one knew better than Oldfield what the turns meant and as he
took his seat, while I was cranking the car for the start, he remarked
cheerily: "Well, this chariot may kill me, but they will say afterward
that I was going like hell when she took me over the bank."

And he did go.... He never dared to look around. He did not shut off on
the curves. He simply let that car go--and go it did. He was about half
a mile ahead of the next man at the end of the race!

The "999" did what it was intended to do: It advertised the fact that I
could build a fast motorcar. A week after the race I formed the Ford
Motor Company. I was vice-president, designer, master mechanic,
superintendent, and general manager. The capitalization of the company
was one hundred thousand dollars, and of this I owned 25 1/2 per cent.
The total amount subscribed in cash was about twenty-eight thousand
dollars--which is the only money that the company has ever received for
the capital fund from other than operations. In the beginning I thought
that it was possible, notwithstanding my former experience, to go
forward with a company in which I owned less than the controlling share.
I very shortly found I had to have control and therefore in 1906, with
funds that I had earned in the company, I bought enough stock to bring
my holdings up to 51 per cent, and a little later bought enough more to
give me 58-1/2 per cent. The new equipment and the whole progress of the
company have always been financed out of earnings. In 1919 my son Edsel
purchased the remaining 41-1/2 per cent of the stock because certain of
the minority stockholders disagreed with my policies. For these shares
he paid at the rate of $12,500 for each $100 par and in all paid about
seventy-five millions.

The original company and its equipment, as may be gathered, were not
elaborate. We rented Strelow's carpenter shop on Mack Avenue. In making
my designs I had also worked out the methods of making, but, since at
that time we could not afford to buy machinery, the entire car was made
according to my designs, but by various manufacturers, and about all we
did, even in the way of assembling, was to put on the wheels, the tires,
and the body. That would really be the most economical method of
manufacturing if only one could be certain that all of the various parts
would be made on the manufacturing plan that I have above outlined. The
most economical manufacturing of the future will be that in which the
whole of an article is not made under one roof--unless, of course, it be
a very simple article. The modern--or better, the future--method is to
have each part made where it may best be made and then assemble the
parts into a complete unit at the points of consumption. That is the
method we are now following and expect to extend. It would make no
difference whether one company or one individual owned all the factories
fabricating the component parts of a single product, or whether such
part were made in our independently owned factory, _if only all adopted
the same service methods_. If we can buy as good a part as we can make
ourselves and the supply is ample and the price right, we do not attempt
to make it ourselves--or, at any rate, to make more than an emergency
supply. In fact, it might be better to have the ownership widely
scattered.

I had been experimenting principally upon the cutting down of weight.
Excess weight kills any self-propelled vehicle. There are a lot of fool
ideas about weight. It is queer, when you come to think of it, how some
fool terms get into current use. There is the phrase "heavyweight" as
applied to a man's mental apparatus! What does it mean? No one wants to
be fat and heavy of body--then why of head? For some clumsy reason we
have come to confuse strength with weight. The crude methods of early
building undoubtedly had much to do with this. The old ox-cart weighed a
ton--and it had so much weight that it was weak! To carry a few tons of
humanity from New York to Chicago, the railroad builds a train that
weighs many hundred tons, and the result is an absolute loss of real
strength and the extravagant waste of untold millions in the form of
power. The law of diminishing returns begins to operate at the point
where strength becomes weight. Weight may be desirable in a steam roller
but nowhere else. Strength has nothing to do with weight. The mentality
of the man who does things in the world is agile, light, and strong. The
most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess
weight has been eliminated. Strength is never just weight--either in men
or things. Whenever any one suggests to me that I might increase weight
or add a part, I look into decreasing weight and eliminating a part! The
car that I designed was lighter than any car that had yet been made. It
would have been lighter if I had known how to make it so--later I got
the materials to make the lighter car.

In our first year we built "Model A," selling the runabout for eight
hundred and fifty dollars and the tonneau for one hundred dollars more.
This model had a two-cylinder opposed motor developing eight horsepower.
It had a chain drive, a seventy-two inch wheel base--which was supposed
to be long--and a fuel capacity of five gallons. We made and sold 1,708
cars in the first year. That is how well the public responded.

Every one of these "Model A's" has a history. Take No. 420. Colonel D.
C. Collier of California bought it in 1904. He used it for a couple of
years, sold it, and bought a new Ford. No. 420 changed hands frequently
until 1907 when it was bought by one Edmund Jacobs living near Ramona in
the heart of the mountains. He drove it for several years in the
roughest kind of work. Then he bought a new Ford and sold his old one.
By 1915 No. 420 had passed into the hands of a man named Cantello who
took out the motor, hitched it to a water pump, rigged up shafts on the
chassis and now, while the motor chugs away at the pumping of water, the
chassis drawn by a burro acts as a buggy. The moral, of course, is that
you can dissect a Ford but you cannot kill it.

In our first advertisement we said:

    Our purpose is to construct and market an automobile specially
    designed for everyday wear and tear--business, professional, and
    family use; an automobile which will attain to a sufficient speed to
    satisfy the average person without acquiring any of those breakneck
    velocities which are so universally condemned; a machine which will
    be admired by man, woman, and child alike for its compactness, its
    simplicity, its safety, its all-around convenience, and--last but
    not least--its exceedingly reasonable price, which places it within
    the reach of many thousands who could not think of paying the
    comparatively fabulous prices asked for most machines.

And these are the points we emphasized:

Good material.

Simplicity--most of the cars at that time required considerable skill in
their management.

The engine.

The ignition--which was furnished by two sets of six dry cell batteries.

The automatic oiling.

The simplicity and the ease of control of the transmission, which was of
the planetary type.

The workmanship.

We did not make the pleasure appeal. We never have. In its first
advertising we showed that a motor car was a utility. We said:

We often hear quoted the old proverb, "Time is money"--and yet how few
business and professional men act as if they really believed its truth.

Men who are constantly complaining of shortage of time and lamenting the
fewness of days in the week--men to whom every five minutes wasted means
a dollar thrown away--men to whom five minutes' delay sometimes means
the loss of many dollars--will yet depend on the haphazard,
uncomfortable, and limited means of transportation afforded by street
cars, etc., when the investment of an exceedingly moderate sum in the
purchase of a perfected, efficient, high-grade automobile would cut out
anxiety and unpunctuality and provide a luxurious means of travel ever
at your beck and call.

Always ready, always sure.

Built to save you time and consequent money.

Built to take you anywhere you want to go and bring you back again on
time.

Built to add to your reputation for punctuality; to keep your customers
good-humoured and in a buying mood.

Built for business or pleasure--just as you say.

Built also for the good of your health--to carry you "jarlessly" over
any kind of half decent roads, to refresh your brain with the luxury of
much "out-doorness" and your lungs with the "tonic of tonics"--the right
kind of atmosphere.

It is your say, too, when it comes to speed. You can--if you
choose--loiter lingeringly through shady avenues or you can press down
on the foot-lever until all the scenery looks alike to you and you have
to keep your eyes skinned to count the milestones as they pass.

I am giving the gist of this advertisement to show that, from the
beginning, we were looking to providing service--we never bothered with
a "sporting car."

The business went along almost as by magic. The cars gained a reputation
for standing up. They were tough, they were simple, and they were well
made. I was working on my design for a universal single model but I had
not settled the designs nor had we the money to build and equip the
proper kind of plant for manufacturing. I had not the money to discover
the very best and lightest materials. We still had to accept the
materials that the market offered--we got the best to be had but we had
no facilities for the scientific investigation of materials or for
original research.

My associates were not convinced that it was possible to restrict our
cars to a single model. The automobile trade was following the old
bicycle trade, in which every manufacturer thought it necessary to bring
out a new model each year and to make it so unlike all previous models
that those who had bought the former models would want to get rid of the
old and buy the new. That was supposed to be good business. It is the
same idea that women submit to in their clothing and hats. That is not
service--it seeks only to provide something new, not something better.
It is extraordinary how firmly rooted is the notion that
business--continuous selling--depends not on satisfying the customer
once and for all, but on first getting his money for one article and
then persuading him he ought to buy a new and different one. The plan
which I then had in the back of my head but to which we were not then
sufficiently advanced to give expression, was that, when a model was
settled upon then every improvement on that model should be
interchangeable with the old model, so that a car should never get out
of date. It is my ambition to have every piece of machinery, or other
non-consumable product that I turn out, so strong and so well made that
no one ought ever to have to buy a second one. A good machine of any
kind ought to last as long as a good watch.

In the second year we scattered our energies among three models. We made
a four-cylinder touring car, "Model B," which sold for two thousand
dollars; "Model C," which was a slightly improved "Model A" and sold at
fifty dollars more than the former price; and "Model F," a touring car
which sold for a thousand dollars. That is, we scattered our energy and
increased prices--and therefore we sold fewer cars than in the first
year. The sales were 1,695 cars.

That "Model B"--the first four-cylinder car for general road use--had to
be advertised. Winning a race or making a record was then the best kind
of advertising. So I fixed up the "Arrow," the twin of the old "999"--in
fact practically remade it--and a week before the New York Automobile
show I drove it myself over a surveyed mile straightaway on the ice. I
shall never forget that race. The ice seemed smooth enough, so smooth
that if I had called off the trial we should have secured an immense
amount of the wrong kind of advertising, but instead of being smooth,
that ice was seamed with fissures which I knew were going to mean
trouble the moment I got up speed. But there was nothing to do but go
through with the trial, and I let the old "Arrow" out. At every fissure
the car leaped into the air. I never knew how it was coming down. When I
wasn't in the air, I was skidding, but somehow I stayed top side up and
on the course, making a record that went all over the world! That put
"Model B" on the map--but not enough on to overcome the price advances.
No stunt and no advertising will sell an article for any length of time.
Business is not a game. The moral is coming.

Our little wooden shop had, with the business we were doing, become
totally inadequate, and in 1906 we took out of our working capital
sufficient funds to build a three-story plant at the corner of Piquette
and Beaubien streets--which for the first time gave us real
manufacturing facilities. We began to make and to assemble quite a
number of the parts, although still we were principally an assembling
shop. In 1905-1906 we made only two models--one the four-cylinder car at
$2,000 and another touring car at $1,000, both being the models of the
previous year--and our sales dropped to 1,599 cars.

Some said it was because we had not brought out new models. I thought it
was because our cars were too expensive--they did not appeal to the 95
per cent. I changed the policy in the next year--having first acquired
stock control. For 1906-1907 we entirely left off making touring cars
and made three models of runabouts and roadsters, none of which differed
materially from the other in manufacturing process or in component
parts, but were somewhat different in appearance. The big thing was that
the cheapest car sold for $600 and the most expensive for only $750, and
right there came the complete demonstration of what price meant. We sold
8,423 cars--nearly five times as many as in our biggest previous year.
Our banner week was that of May 15, 1908, when we assembled 311 cars in
six working days. It almost swamped our facilities. The foreman had a
tallyboard on which he chalked up each car as it was finished and turned
over to the testers. The tallyboard was hardly equal to the task. On one
day in the following June we assembled an even one hundred cars.

In the next year we departed from the programme that had been so
successful and I designed a big car--fifty horsepower, six
cylinder--that would burn up the roads. We continued making our small
cars, but the 1907 panic and the diversion to the more expensive model
cut down the sales to 6,398 cars.

We had been through an experimenting period of five years. The cars were
beginning to be sold in Europe. The business, as an automobile business
then went, was considered extraordinarily prosperous. We had plenty of
money. Since the first year we have practically always had plenty of
money. We sold for cash, we did not borrow money, and we sold directly
to the purchaser. We had no bad debts and we kept within ourselves on
every move. I have always kept well within my resources. I have never
found it necessary to strain them, because, inevitably, if you give
attention to work and service, the resources will increase more rapidly
than you can devise ways and means of disposing of them.

We were careful in the selection of our salesmen. At first there was
great difficulty in getting good salesmen because the automobile trade
was not supposed to be stable. It was supposed to be dealing in a
luxury--in pleasure vehicles. We eventually appointed agents, selecting
the very best men we could find, and then paying to them a salary larger
than they could possibly earn in business for themselves. In the
beginning we had not paid much in the way of salaries. We were feeling
our way, but when we knew what our way was, we adopted the policy of
paying the very highest reward for service and then insisting upon
getting the highest service. Among the requirements for an agent we laid
down the following:

(1) A progressive, up-to-date man keenly alive to the possibilities of
    business.

(2) A suitable place of business clean and dignified in appearance.

(3) A stock of parts sufficient to make prompt replacements and keep in
active service every Ford car in his territory.

(4) An adequately equipped repair shop which has in it the right
machinery for every necessary repair and adjustment.

(5) Mechanics who are thoroughly familiar with the construction and
operation of Ford cars.

(6) A comprehensive bookkeeping system and a follow-up sales system, so
that it may be instantly apparent what is the financial status of the
various departments of his business, the condition and size of his
stock, the present owners of cars, and the future prospects.

(7) Absolute cleanliness throughout every department. There must be no
unwashed windows, dusty furniture, dirty floors.

(8) A suitable display sign.

(9) The adoption of policies which will ensure absolutely square dealing
and the highest character of business ethics.

And this is the general instruction that was issued:

    A dealer or a salesman ought to have the name of every possible
    automobile buyer in his territory, including all those who have
    never given the matter a thought. He should then personally solicit
    by visitation if possible--by correspondence at the least--every man
    on that list and then making necessary memoranda, know the
    automobile situation as related to every resident so solicited. If
    your territory is too large to permit this, you have too much
    territory.

The way was not easy. We were harried by a big suit brought against the
company to try to force us into line with an association of automobile
manufacturers, who were operating under the false principle that there
was only a limited market for automobiles and that a monopoly of that
market was essential. This was the famous Selden Patent suit. At times
the support of our defense severely strained our resources. Mr. Selden,
who has but recently died, had little to do with the suit. It was the
association which sought a monopoly under the patent. The situation was
this:

George B. Selden, a patent attorney, filed an application as far back as
1879 for a patent the object of which was stated to be "The production
of a safe, simple, and cheap road locomotive, light in weight, easy to
control, possessed of sufficient power to overcome an ordinary
inclination." This application was kept alive in the Patent Office, by
methods which are perfectly legal, until 1895, when the patent was
granted. In 1879, when the application was filed, the automobile was
practically unknown to the general public, but by the time the patent
was issued everybody was familiar with self-propelled vehicles, and most
of the men, including myself, who had been for years working on motor
propulsion, were surprised to learn that what we had made practicable
was covered by an application of years before, although the applicant
had kept his idea merely as an idea. He had done nothing to put it into
practice.

The specific claims under the patent were divided into six groups and I
think that not a single one of them was a really new idea even in 1879
when the application was filed. The Patent Office allowed a combination
and issued a so-called "combination patent" deciding that the
combination (a) of a carriage with its body machinery and steering
wheel, with the (b) propelling mechanism clutch and gear, and finally
(c) the engine, made a valid patent.

With all of that we were not concerned. I believed that my engine had
nothing whatsoever in common with what Selden had in mind. The powerful
combination of manufacturers who called themselves the "licensed
manufacturers" because they operated under licenses from the patentee,
brought suit against us as soon as we began to be a factor in motor
production. The suit dragged on. It was intended to scare us out of
business. We took volumes of testimony, and the blow came on September
15, 1909, when Judge Hough rendered an opinion in the United States
District Court finding against us. Immediately that Licensed Association
began to advertise, warning prospective purchasers against our cars.
They had done the same thing in 1903 at the start of the suit, when it
was thought that we could be put out of business. I had implicit
confidence that eventually we should win our suit. I simply knew that we
were right, but it was a considerable blow to get the first decision
against us, for we believed that many buyers--even though no injunction
was issued against us--would be frightened away from buying because of
the threats of court action against individual owners. The idea was
spread that if the suit finally went against me, every man who owned a
Ford car would be prosecuted. Some of my more enthusiastic opponents, I
understand, gave it out privately that there would be criminal as well
as civil suits and that a man buying a Ford car might as well be buying
a ticket to jail. We answered with an advertisement for which we took
four pages in the principal newspapers all over the country. We set out
our case--we set out our confidence in victory--and in conclusion said:

In conclusion we beg to state if there are any prospective automobile
buyers who are at all intimidated by the claims made by our adversaries
that we will give them, in addition to the protection of the Ford Motor
Company with its some $6,000,000.00 of assets, an individual bond backed
by a Company of more than $6,000,000.00 more of assets, so that each and
every individual owner of a Ford car will be protected until at least
$12,000,000.00 of assets have been wiped out by those who desire to
control and monopolize this wonderful industry.

The bond is yours for the asking, so do not allow yourself to be sold
inferior cars at extravagant prices because of any statement made by
this "Divine" body.

N. B.--This fight is not being waged by the Ford Motor Company without
the advice and counsel of the ablest patent attorneys of the East and
West.

We thought that the bond would give assurance to the buyers--that they
needed confidence. They did not. We sold more than eighteen thousand
cars--nearly double the output of the previous year--and I think about
fifty buyers asked for bonds--perhaps it was less than that.

As a matter of fact, probably nothing so well advertised the Ford car
and the Ford Motor Company as did this suit. It appeared that we were
the under dog and we had the public's sympathy. The association had
seventy million dollars--we at the beginning had not half that number of
thousands. I never had a doubt as to the outcome, but nevertheless it
was a sword hanging over our heads that we could as well do without.
Prosecuting that suit was probably one of the most shortsighted acts
that any group of American business men has ever combined to commit.
Taken in all its sidelights, it forms the best possible example of
joining unwittingly to kill a trade. I regard it as most fortunate for
the automobile makers of the country that we eventually won, and the
association ceased to be a serious factor in the business. By 1908,
however, in spite of this suit, we had come to a point where it was
possible to announce and put into fabrication the kind of car that I
wanted to build.




CHAPTER IV

THE SECRET OF MANUFACTURING AND SERVING


Now I am not outlining the career of the Ford Motor Company for any
personal reason. I am not saying: "Go thou and do likewise." What I am
trying to emphasize is that the ordinary way of doing business is not
the best way. I am coming to the point of my entire departure from the
ordinary methods. From this point dates the extraordinary success of the
company.

We had been fairly following the custom of the trade. Our automobile was
less complex than any other. We had no outside money in the concern. But
aside from these two points we did not differ materially from the other
automobile companies, excepting that we had been somewhat more
successful and had rigidly pursued the policy of taking all cash
discounts, putting our profits back into the business, and maintaining a
large cash balance. We entered cars in all of the races. We advertised
and we pushed our sales. Outside of the simplicity of the construction
of the car, our main difference in design was that we made no provision
for the purely "pleasure car." We were just as much a pleasure car as
any other car on the market, but we gave no attention to purely luxury
features. We would do special work for a buyer, and I suppose that we
would have made a special car at a price. We were a prosperous company.
We might easily have sat down and said: "Now we have arrived. Let us
hold what we have got."

Indeed, there was some disposition to take this stand. Some of the
stockholders were seriously alarmed when our production reached one
hundred cars a day. They wanted to do something to stop me from ruining
the company, and when I replied to the effect that one hundred cars a
day was only a trifle and that I hoped before long to make a thousand a
day, they were inexpressibly shocked and I understand seriously
contemplated court action. If I had followed the general opinion of my
associates I should have kept the business about as it was, put our
funds into a fine administration building, tried to make bargains with
such competitors as seemed too active, made new designs from time to
time to catch the fancy of the public, and generally have passed on into
the position of a quiet, respectable citizen with a quiet, respectable
business.

The temptation to stop and hang on to what one has is quite natural. I
can entirely sympathize with the desire to quit a life of activity and
retire to a life of ease. I have never felt the urge myself but I can
comprehend what it is--although I think that a man who retires ought
entirely to get out of a business. There is a disposition to retire and
retain control. It was, however, no part of my plan to do anything of
that sort. I regarded our progress merely as an invitation to do
more--as an indication that we had reached a place where we might begin
to perform a real service. I had been planning every day through these
years toward a universal car. The public had given its reactions to the
various models. The cars in service, the racing, and the road tests gave
excellent guides as to the changes that ought to be made, and even by
1905 I had fairly in mind the specifications of the kind of car I wanted
to build. But I lacked the material to give strength without weight. I
came across that material almost by accident.

In 1905 I was at a motor race at Palm Beach. There was a big smash-up
and a French car was wrecked. We had entered our "Model K"--the
high-powered six. I thought the foreign cars had smaller and better
parts than we knew anything about. After the wreck I picked up a little
valve strip stem. It was very light and very strong. I asked what it was
made of. Nobody knew. I gave the stem to my assistant.

"Find out all about this," I told him. "That is the kind of material we
ought to have in our cars."

He found eventually that it was a French steel and that there was
vanadium in it. We tried every steel maker in America--not one could
make vanadium steel. I sent to England for a man who understood how to
make the steel commercially. The next thing was to get a plant to turn
it out. That was another problem. Vanadium requires 3,000 degrees
Fahrenheit. The ordinary furnace could not go beyond 2,700 degrees. I
found a small steel company in Canton, Ohio. I offered to guarantee them
against loss if they would run a heat for us. They agreed. The first
heat was a failure. Very little vanadium remained in the steel. I had
them try again, and the second time the steel came through. Until then
we had been forced to be satisfied with steel running between 60,000 and
70,000 pounds tensile strength. With vanadium, the strength went up to
170,000 pounds.

Having vanadium in hand I pulled apart our models and tested in detail
to determine what kind of steel was best for every part--whether we
wanted a hard steel, a tough steel, or an elastic steel. We, for the
first time I think, in the history of any large construction, determined
scientifically the exact quality of the steel. As a result we then
selected twenty different types of steel for the various steel parts.
About ten of these were vanadium. Vanadium was used wherever strength
and lightness were required. Of course they are not all the same kind of
vanadium steel. The other elements vary according to whether the part is
to stand hard wear or whether it needs spring--in short, according to
what it needs. Before these experiments I believe that not more than
four different grades of steel had ever been used in automobile
construction. By further experimenting, especially in the direction of
heat treating, we have been able still further to increase the strength
of the steel and therefore to reduce the weight of the car. In 1910 the
French Department of Commerce and Industry took one of our steering
spindle connecting rod yokes--selecting it as a vital unit--and tried it
against a similar part from what they considered the best French car,
and in every test our steel proved the stronger.

The vanadium steel disposed of much of the weight. The other requisites
of a universal car I had already worked out and many of them were in
practice. The design had to balance. Men die because a part gives out.
Machines wreck themselves because some parts are weaker than others.
Therefore, a part of the problem in designing a universal car was to
have as nearly as possible all parts of equal strength considering their
purpose--to put a motor in a one-horse shay. Also it had to be fool
proof. This was difficult because a gasoline motor is essentially a
delicate instrument and there is a wonderful opportunity for any one who
has a mind that way to mess it up. I adopted this slogan:

"When one of my cars breaks down I know I am to blame."

From the day the first motor car appeared on the streets it had to me
appeared to be a necessity. It was this knowledge and assurance that led
me to build to the one end--a car that would meet the wants of the
multitudes. All my efforts were then and still are turned to the
production of one car--one model. And, year following year, the pressure
was, and still is, to improve and refine and make better, with an
increasing reduction in price. The universal car had to have these
attributes:

(1) Quality in material to give service in use. Vanadium steel is the
strongest, toughest, and most lasting of steels. It forms the foundation
and super-structure of the cars. It is the highest quality steel in this
respect in the world, regardless of price.

(2) Simplicity in operation--because the masses are not mechanics.

(3) Power in sufficient quantity.

(4) Absolute reliability--because of the varied uses to which the cars
would be put and the variety of roads over which they would travel.

(5) Lightness. With the Ford there are only 7.95 pounds to be carried by
each cubic inch of piston displacement. This is one of the reasons why
Ford cars are "always going," wherever and whenever you see
them--through sand and mud, through slush, snow, and water, up hills,
across fields and roadless plains.

(6) Control--to hold its speed always in hand, calmly and safely meeting
every emergency and contingency either in the crowded streets of the
city or on dangerous roads. The planetary transmission of the Ford gave
this control and anybody could work it. That is the "why" of the saying:
"Anybody can drive a Ford." It can turn around almost anywhere.

(7) The more a motor car weighs, naturally the more fuel and lubricants
are used in the driving; the lighter the weight, the lighter the expense
of operation. The light weight of the Ford car in its early years was
used as an argument against it. Now that is all changed.

The design which I settled upon was called "Model T." The important
feature of the new model--which, if it were accepted, as I thought it
would be, I intended to make the only model and then start into real
production--was its simplicity. There were but four constructional units
in the car--the power plant, the frame, the front axle, and the rear
axle. All of these were easily accessible and they were designed so that
no special skill would be required for their repair or replacement. I
believed then, although I said very little about it because of the
novelty of the idea, that it ought to be possible to have parts so
simple and so inexpensive that the menace of expensive hand repair work
would be entirely eliminated. The parts could be made so cheaply that it
would be less expensive to buy new ones than to have old ones repaired.
They could be carried in hardware shops just as nails or bolts are
carried. I thought that it was up to me as the designer to make the car
so completely simple that no one could fail to understand it.

That works both ways and applies to everything. The less complex an
article, the easier it is to make, the cheaper it may be sold, and
therefore the greater number may be sold.

It is not necessary to go into the technical details of the construction
but perhaps this is as good a place as any to review the various models,
because "Model T" was the last of the models and the policy which it
brought about took this business out of the ordinary line of business.
Application of the same idea would take any business out of the ordinary
run.

I designed eight models in all before "Model T." They were: "Model A,"
"Model B," "Model C," "Model F," "Model N," "Model R," "Model S," and
"Model K." Of these, Models "A," "C," and "F" had two-cylinder opposed
horizontal motors. In "Model A" the motor was at the rear of the
driver's seat. In all of the other models it was in a hood in front.
Models "B," "N," "R," and "S" had motors of the four-cylinder vertical
type. "Model K" had six cylinders. "Model A" developed eight horsepower.
"Model B" developed twenty-four horsepower with a 4-1/2-inch cylinder
and a 5-inch stroke. The highest horsepower was in "Model K," the
six-cylinder car, which developed forty horsepower. The largest
cylinders were those of "Model B." The smallest were in Models "N," "R,"
and "S" which were 3-3/4 inches in diameter with a 3-3/8-inch stroke.
"Model T" has a 3-3/4-inch cylinder with a 4-inch stroke. The ignition
was by dry batteries in all excepting "Model B," which had storage
batteries, and in "Model K" which had both battery and magneto. In the
present model, the magneto is a part of the power plant and is built in.
The clutch in the first four models was of the cone type; in the last
four and in the present model, of the multiple disc type. The
transmission in all of the cars has been planetary. "Model A" had a
chain drive. "Model B" had a shaft drive. The next two models had chain
drives. Since then all of the cars have had shaft drives. "Model A" had
a 72-inch wheel base. Model "B," which was an extremely good car, had 92
inches. "Model K" had 120 inches. "Model C" had 78 inches. The others
had 84 inches, and the present car has 100 inches. In the first five
models all of the equipment was extra. The next three were sold with a
partial equipment. The present car is sold with full equipment. Model
"A" weighed 1,250 pounds. The lightest cars were Models "N" and "R."
They weighed 1,050 pounds, but they were both runabouts. The heaviest
car was the six-cylinder, which weighed 2,000 pounds. The present car
weighs 1,200 lbs.

The "Model T" had practically no features which were not contained in
some one or other of the previous models. Every detail had been fully
tested in practice. There was no guessing as to whether or not it would
be a successful model. It had to be. There was no way it could escape
being so, for it had not been made in a day. It contained all that I was
then able to put into a motor car plus the material, which for the first
time I was able to obtain. We put out "Model T" for the season
1908-1909.

The company was then five years old. The original factory space had been
.28 acre. We had employed an average of 311 people in the first year,
built 1,708 cars, and had one branch house. In 1908, the factory space
had increased to 2.65 acres and we owned the building. The average
number of employees had increased to 1,908. We built 6,181 cars and had
fourteen branch houses. It was a prosperous business.

During the season 1908-1909 we continued to make Models "R" and "S,"
four-cylinder runabouts and roadsters, the models that had previously
been so successful, and which sold at $700 and $750. But "Model T" swept
them right out. We sold 10,607 cars--a larger number than any
manufacturer had ever sold. The price for the touring car was $850. On
the same chassis we mounted a town car at $1,000, a roadster at $825, a
coupe at $950, and a landaulet at $950.

This season demonstrated conclusively to me that it was time to put the
new policy in force. The salesmen, before I had announced the policy,
were spurred by the great sales to think that even greater sales might
be had if only we had more models. It is strange how, just as soon as an
article becomes successful, somebody starts to think that it would be
more successful if only it were different. There is a tendency to keep
monkeying with styles and to spoil a good thing by changing it. The
salesmen were insistent on increasing the line. They listened to the 5
per cent., the special customers who could say what they wanted, and
forgot all about the 95 per cent. who just bought without making any
fuss. No business can improve unless it pays the closest possible
attention to complaints and suggestions. If there is any defect in
service then that must be instantly and rigorously investigated, but
when the suggestion is only as to style, one has to make sure whether it
is not merely a personal whim that is being voiced. Salesmen always want
to cater to whims instead of acquiring sufficient knowledge of their
product to be able to explain to the customer with the whim that what
they have will satisfy his every requirement--that is, of course,
provided what they have does satisfy these requirements.

Therefore in 1909 I announced one morning, without any previous warning,
that in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model
was going to be "Model T," and that the chassis would be exactly the
same for all cars, and I remarked:

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as
it is black."

I cannot say that any one agreed with me. The selling people could not
of course see the advantages that a single model would bring about in
production. More than that, they did not particularly care. They thought
that our production was good enough as it was and there was a very
decided opinion that lowering the sales price would hurt sales, that the
people who wanted quality would be driven away and that there would be
none to replace them. There was very little conception of the motor
industry. A motor car was still regarded as something in the way of a
luxury. The manufacturers did a good deal to spread this idea. Some
clever persons invented the name "pleasure car" and the advertising
emphasized the pleasure features. The sales people had ground for their
objections and particularly when I made the following announcement:

"I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large
enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and
care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men
to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can
devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary
will be unable to own one--and enjoy with his family the blessing of
hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."

This announcement was received not without pleasure. The general comment
was:

"If Ford does that he will be out of business in six months."

The impression was that a good car could not be built at a low price,
and that, anyhow, there was no use in building a low-priced car because
only wealthy people were in the market for cars. The 1908-1909 sales of
more than ten thousand cars had convinced me that we needed a new
factory. We already had a big modern factory--the Piquette Street plant.
It was as good as, perhaps a little better than, any automobile factory
in the country. But I did not see how it was going to care for the sales
and production that were inevitable. So I bought sixty acres at Highland
Park, which was then considered away out in the country from Detroit.
The amount of ground bought and the plans for a bigger factory than the
world has ever seen were opposed. The question was already being asked:

"How soon will Ford blow up?"

Nobody knows how many thousand times it has been asked since. It is
asked only because of the failure to grasp that a principle rather than
an individual is at work, and the principle is so simple that it seems
mysterious.

For 1909-1910, in order to pay for the new land and buildings, I
slightly raised the prices. This is perfectly justifiable and results in
a benefit, not an injury, to the purchaser. I did exactly the same thing
a few years ago--or rather, in that case I did not lower the price as is
my annual custom, in order to build the River Rouge plant. The extra
money might in each case have been had by borrowing, but then we should
have had a continuing charge upon the business and all subsequent cars
would have had to bear this charge. The price of all the models was
increased $100, with the exception of the roadster, which was increased
only $75 and of the landaulet and town car, which were increased $150
and $200 respectively. We sold 18,664 cars, and then for 1910-1911, with
the new facilities, I cut the touring car from $950 to $780 and we sold
34,528 cars. That is the beginning of the steady reduction in the price
of the cars in the face of ever-increasing cost of materials and
ever-higher wages.

Contrast the year 1908 with the year 1911. The factory space increased
from 2.65 to 32 acres. The average number of employees from 1,908 to
4,110, and the cars built from a little over six thousand to nearly
thirty-five thousand. You will note that men were not employed in
proportion to the output.

We were, almost overnight it seems, in great production. How did all
this come about?

Simply through the application of an inevitable principle. By the
application of intelligently directed power and machinery. In a little
dark shop on a side street an old man had laboured for years making axe
handles. Out of seasoned hickory he fashioned them, with the help of a
draw shave, a chisel, and a supply of sandpaper. Carefully was each
handle weighed and balanced. No two of them were alike. The curve must
exactly fit the hand and must conform to the grain of the wood. From
dawn until dark the old man laboured. His average product was eight
handles a week, for which he received a dollar and a half each. And
often some of these were unsaleable--because the balance was not true.

To-day you can buy a better axe handle, made by machinery, for a few
cents. And you need not worry about the balance. They are all alike--and
every one is perfect. Modern methods applied in a big way have not only
brought the cost of axe handles down to a fraction of their former
cost--but they have immensely improved the product.

It was the application of these same methods to the making of the Ford
car that at the very start lowered the price and heightened the quality.
We just developed an idea. The nucleus of a business may be an idea.
That is, an inventor or a thoughtful workman works out a new and better
way to serve some established human need; the idea commends itself, and
people want to avail themselves of it. In this way a single individual
may prove, through his idea or discovery, the nucleus of a business. But
the creation of the body and bulk of that business is shared by everyone
who has anything to do with it. No manufacturer can say: "I built this
business"--if he has required the help of thousands of men in building
it. It is a joint production. Everyone employed in it has contributed
something to it. By working and producing they make it possible for the
purchasing world to keep coming to that business for the type of service
it provides, and thus they help establish a custom, a trade, a habit
which supplies them with a livelihood. That is the way our company grew
and just how I shall start explaining in the next chapter.

In the meantime, the company had become world-wide. We had branches in
London and in Australia. We were shipping to every part of the world,
and in England particularly we were beginning to be as well known as in
America. The introduction of the car in England was somewhat difficult
on account of the failure of the American bicycle. Because the American
bicycle had not been suited to English uses it was taken for granted and
made a point of by the distributors that no American vehicle could
appeal to the British market. Two "Model A's" found their way to England
in 1903. The newspapers refused to notice them. The automobile agents
refused to take the slightest interest. It was rumoured that the
principal components of its manufacture were string and hoop wire and
that a buyer would be lucky if it held together for a fortnight! In the
first year about a dozen cars in all were used; the second was only a
little better. And I may say as to the reliability of that "Model A"
that most of them after nearly twenty years are still in some kind of
service in England.

In 1905 our agent entered a "Model C" in the Scottish Reliability
Trials. In those days reliability runs were more popular in England than
motor races. Perhaps there was no inkling that after all an automobile
was not merely a toy. The Scottish Trials was over eight hundred miles
of hilly, heavy roads. The Ford came through with only one involuntary
stop against it. That started the Ford sales in England. In that same
year Ford taxicabs were placed in London for the first time. In the next
several years the sales began to pick up. The cars went into every
endurance and reliability test and won every one of them. The Brighton
dealer had ten Fords driven over the South Downs for two days in a kind
of steeplechase and every one of them came through. As a result six
hundred cars were sold that year. In 1911 Henry Alexander drove a "Model
T" to the top of Ben Nevis, 4,600 feet. That year 14,060 cars were sold
in England, and it has never since been necessary to stage any kind of a
stunt. We eventually opened our own factory at Manchester; at first it
was purely an assembling plant. But as the years have gone by we have
progressively made more and more of the car.




CHAPTER V

GETTING INTO PRODUCTION


If a device would save in time just 10 per cent. or increase results 10
per cent., then its absence is always a 10 per cent. tax. If the time of
a person is worth fifty cents an hour, a 10 per cent. saving is worth
five cents an hour. If the owner of a skyscraper could increase his
income 10 per cent., he would willingly pay half the increase just to
know how. The reason why he owns a skyscraper is that science has proved
that certain materials, used in a given way, can save space and increase
rental incomes. A building thirty stories high needs no more ground
space than one five stories high. Getting along with the old-style
architecture costs the five-story man the income of twenty-five floors.
Save ten steps a day for each of twelve thousand employees and you will
have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.

Those are the principles on which the production of my plant was built
up. They all come practically as of course. In the beginning we tried to
get machinists. As the necessity for production increased it became
apparent not only that enough machinists were not to be had, but also
that skilled men were not necessary in production, and out of this grew
a principle that I later want to present in full.

It is self-evident that a majority of the people in the world are not
mentally--even if they are physically--capable of making a good living.
That is, they are not capable of furnishing with their own hands a
sufficient quantity of the goods which this world needs to be able to
exchange their unaided product for the goods which they need. I have
heard it said, in fact I believe it is quite a current thought, that we
have taken skill out of work. We have not. We have put in skill. We have
put a higher skill into planning, management, and tool building, and the
results of that skill are enjoyed by the man who is not skilled. This I
shall later enlarge on.

We have to recognize the unevenness in human mental equipments. If every
job in our place required skill the place would never have existed.
Sufficiently skilled men to the number needed could not have been
trained in a hundred years. A million men working by hand could not even
approximate our present daily output. No one could manage a million men.
But more important than that, the product of the unaided hands of those
million men could not be sold at a price in consonance with buying
power. And even if it were possible to imagine such an aggregation and
imagine its management and correlation, just think of the area that it
would have to occupy! How many of the men would be engaged, not in
producing, but in merely carrying from place to place what the other men
had produced? I cannot see how under such conditions the men could
possibly be paid more than ten or twenty cents a day--for of course it
is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the
product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges the
production so that the product may pay the wages.

The more economical methods of production did not begin all at once.
They began gradually--just as we began gradually to make our own parts.
"Model T" was the first motor that we made ourselves. The great
economies began in assembling and then extended to other sections so
that, while to-day we have skilled mechanics in plenty, they do not
produce automobiles--they make it easy for others to produce them. Our
skilled men are the tool makers, the experimental workmen, the
machinists, and the pattern makers. They are as good as any men in the
world--so good, indeed, that they should not be wasted in doing that
which the machines they contrive can do better. The rank and file of men
come to us unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few hours or a few
days. If they do not learn within that time they will never be of any
use to us. These men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is
required before they are taken on is that they should be potentially
able to do enough work to pay the overhead charges on the floor space
they occupy. They do not have to be able-bodied men. We have jobs that
require great physical strength--although they are rapidly lessening; we
have other jobs that require no strength whatsoever--jobs which, as far
as strength is concerned, might be attended to by a child of three.

It is not possible, without going deeply into technical processes, to
present the whole development of manufacturing, step by step, in the
order in which each thing came about. I do not know that this could be
done, because something has been happening nearly every day and nobody
can keep track. Take at random a number of the changes. From them it is
possible not only to gain some idea of what will happen when this world
is put on a production basis, but also to see how much more we pay for
things than we ought to, and how much lower wages are than they ought to
be, and what a vast field remains to be explored. The Ford Company is
only a little way along on the journey.

A Ford car contains about five thousand parts--that is counting screws,
nuts, and all. Some of the parts are fairly bulky and others are almost
the size of watch parts. In our first assembling we simply started to
put a car together at a spot on the floor and workmen brought to it the
parts as they were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a
house. When we started to make parts it was natural to create a single
department of the factory to make that part, but usually one workman
performed all of the operations necessary on a small part. The rapid
press of production made it necessary to devise plans of production that
would avoid having the workers falling over one another. The undirected
worker spends more of his time walking about for materials and tools
than he does in working; he gets small pay because pedestrianism is not
a highly paid line.

The first step forward in assembly came when we began taking the work to
the men instead of the men to the work. We now have two general
principles in all operations--that a man shall never have to take more
than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever
stoop over.

The principles of assembly are these:

(1) Place the tools and the men in the sequence of the operation so that
each component part shall travel the least possible distance while in
the process of finishing.

(2) Use work slides or some other form of carrier so that when a workman
completes his operation, he drops the part always in the same
place--which place must always be the most convenient place to his
hand--and if possible have gravity carry the part to the next workman
for his operation.

(3) Use sliding assembling lines by which the parts to be assembled are
delivered at convenient distances.

The net result of the application of these principles is the reduction
of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction
of his movements to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one
thing with only one movement. The assembling of the chassis is, from the
point of view of the non-mechanical mind, our most interesting and
perhaps best known operation, and at one time it was an exceedingly
important operation. We now ship out the parts for assembly at the point
of distribution.

Along about April 1, 1913, we first tried the experiment of an assembly
line. We tried it on assembling the flywheel magneto. We try everything
in a little way first--we will rip out anything once we discover a
better way, but we have to know absolutely that the new way is going to
be better than the old before we do anything drastic.

I believe that this was the first moving line ever installed. The idea
came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers
use in dressing beef. We had previously assembled the fly-wheel magneto
in the usual method. With one workman doing a complete job he could turn
out from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day, or about twenty
minutes to an assembly. What he did alone was then spread into
twenty-nine operations; that cut down the assembly time to thirteen
minutes, ten seconds. Then we raised the height of the line eight
inches--this was in 1914--and cut the time to seven minutes. Further
experimenting with the speed that the work should move at cut the time
down to five minutes. In short, the result is this: by the aid of
scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than four did
only a comparatively few years ago. That line established the efficiency
of the method and we now use it everywhere. The assembling of the motor,
formerly done by one man, is now divided into eighty-four
operations--those men do the work that three times their number formerly
did. In a short time we tried out the plan on the chassis.

About the best we had done in stationary chassis assembling was an
average of twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes per chassis. We tried
the experiment of drawing the chassis with a rope and windlass down a
line two hundred fifty feet long. Six assemblers traveled with the
chassis and picked up the parts from piles placed along the line. This
rough experiment reduced the time to five hours fifty minutes per
chassis. In the early part of 1914 we elevated the assembly line. We had
adopted the policy of "man-high" work; we had one line twenty-six and
three quarter inches and another twenty-four and one half inches from
the floor--to suit squads of different heights. The waist-high
arrangement and a further subdivision of work so that each man had fewer
movements cut down the labour time per chassis to one hour thirty-three
minutes. Only the chassis was then assembled in the line. The body was
placed on in "John R. Street"--the famous street that runs through our
Highland Park factories. Now the line assembles the whole car.

It must not be imagined, however, that all this worked out as quickly as
it sounds. The speed of the moving work had to be carefully tried out;
in the fly-wheel magneto we first had a speed of sixty inches per
minute. That was too fast. Then we tried eighteen inches per minute.
That was too slow. Finally we settled on forty-four inches per minute.
The idea is that a man must not be hurried in his work--he must have
every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second. We have
worked out speeds for each assembly, for the success of the chassis
assembly caused us gradually to overhaul our entire method of
manufacturing and to put all assembling in mechanically driven lines.
The chassis assembling line, for instance, goes at a pace of six feet
per minute; the front axle assembly line goes at one hundred eighty-nine
inches per minute. In the chassis assembling are forty-five separate
operations or stations. The first men fasten four mud-guard brackets to
the chassis frame; the motor arrives on the tenth operation and so on in
detail. Some men do only one or two small operations, others do more.
The man who places a part does not fasten it--the part may not be fully
in place until after several operations later. The man who puts in a
bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not
tighten it. On operation number thirty-four the budding motor gets its
gasoline; it has previously received lubrication; on operation number
forty-four the radiator is filled with water, and on operation number
forty-five the car drives out onto John R. Street.

Essentially the same ideas have been applied to the assembling of the
motor. In October, 1913, it required nine hours and fifty-four minutes
of labour time to assemble one motor; six months later, by the moving
assembly method, this time had been reduced to five hours and fifty-six
minutes. Every piece of work in the shops moves; it may move on hooks on
overhead chains going to assembly in the exact order in which the parts
are required; it may travel on a moving platform, or it may go by
gravity, but the point is that there is no lifting or trucking of
anything other than materials. Materials are brought in on small trucks
or trailers operated by cut-down Ford chassis, which are sufficiently
mobile and quick to get in and out of any aisle where they may be
required to go. No workman has anything to do with moving or lifting
anything. That is all in a separate department--the department of
transportation.

We started assembling a motor car in a single factory. Then as we began
to make parts, we began to departmentalize so that each department would
do only one thing. As the factory is now organized each department makes
only a single part or assembles a part. A department is a little factory
in itself. The part comes into it as raw material or as a casting, goes
through the sequence of machines and heat treatments, or whatever may be
required, and leaves that department finished. It was only because of
transport ease that the departments were grouped together when we
started to manufacture. I did not know that such minute divisions would
be possible; but as our production grew and departments multiplied, we
actually changed from making automobiles to making parts. Then we found
that we had made another new discovery, which was that by no means all
of the parts had to be made in one factory. It was not really a
discovery--it was something in the nature of going around in a circle to
my first manufacturing when I bought the motors and probably ninety per
cent. of the parts. When we began to make our own parts we practically
took for granted that they all had to be made in the one factory--that
there was some special virtue in having a single roof over the
manufacture of the entire car. We have now developed away from this. If
we build any more large factories, it will be only because the making of
a single part must be in such tremendous volume as to require a large
unit. I hope that in the course of time the big Highland Park plant will
be doing only one or two things. The casting has already been taken away
from it and has gone to the River Rouge plant. So now we are on our way
back to where we started from--excepting that, instead of buying our
parts on the outside, we are beginning to make them in our own factories
on the outside.

This is a development which holds exceptional consequences, for it
means, as I shall enlarge in a later chapter, that highly standardized,
highly subdivided industry need no longer become concentrated in large
plants with all the inconveniences of transportation and housing that
hamper large plants. A thousand or five hundred men ought to be enough
in a single factory; then there would be no problem of transporting them
to work or away from work and there would be no slums or any of the
other unnatural ways of living incident to the overcrowding that must
take place if the workmen are to live within reasonable distances of a
very large plant.

Highland Park now has five hundred departments. Down at our Piquette
plant we had only eighteen departments, and formerly at Highland Park we
had only one hundred and fifty departments. This illustrates how far we
are going in the manufacture of parts.

Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in
machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is
called "the best shop practice." I recall that a machine manufacturer
was once called into conference on the building of a special machine.
The specifications called for an output of two hundred per hour.

"This is a mistake," said the manufacturer, "you mean two hundred a
day--no machine can be forced to two hundred an hour."

The company officer sent for the man who had designed the machine and
they called his attention to the specification. He said:

"Yes, what about it?"

"It can't be done," said the manufacturer positively, "no machine built
will do that--it is out of the question."

"Out of the question!" exclaimed the engineer, "if you will come down to
the main floor you will see one doing it; we built one to see if it
could be done and now we want more like it."

The factory keeps no record of experiments. The foremen and
superintendents remember what has been done. If a certain method has
formerly been tried and failed, somebody will remember it--but I am not
particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried
to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many
things that could not be done. That is one of the troubles with
extensive records. If you keep on recording all of your failures you
will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to
try--whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a
certain method that another man will not succeed.

They told us we could not cast gray iron by our endless chain method and
I believe there is a record of failures. But we are doing it. The man
who carried through our work either did not know or paid no attention to
the previous figures. Likewise we were told that it was out of the
question to pour the hot iron directly from the blast furnace into
mould. The usual method is to run the iron into pigs, let them season
for a time, and then remelt them for casting. But at the River Rouge
plant we are casting directly from cupolas that are filled from the
blast furnaces. Then, too, a record of failures--particularly if it is a
dignified and well-authenticated record--deters a young man from trying.
We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels
fear to tread.

None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it
necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an
expert--because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows
his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has
done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant
of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead,
thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which
nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of
mind a great number of things become impossible.

I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover
that any one knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say
what is and what is not possible. The right kind of experience, the
right kind of technical training, ought to enlarge the mind and reduce
the number of impossibilities. It unfortunately does nothing of the
kind. Most technical training and the average of that which we call
experience, provide a record of previous failures and, instead of these
failures being taken for what they are worth, they are taken as absolute
bars to progress. If some man, calling himself an authority, says that
this or that cannot be done, then a horde of unthinking followers start
the chorus: "It can't be done."

Take castings. Castings has always been a wasteful process and is so old
that it has accumulated many traditions which make improvements
extraordinarily difficult to bring about. I believe one authority on
moulding declared--before we started our experiments--that any man who
said he could reduce costs within half a year wrote himself down as a
fraud.

Our foundry used to be much like other foundries. When we cast the first
"Model T" cylinders in 1910, everything in the place was done by hand;
shovels and wheelbarrows abounded. The work was then either skilled or
unskilled; we had moulders and we had labourers. Now we have about five
per cent. of thoroughly skilled moulders and core setters, but the
remaining 95 per cent. are unskilled, or to put it more accurately, must
be skilled in exactly one operation which the most stupid man can learn
within two days. The moulding is all done by machinery. Each part which
we have to cast has a unit or units of its own--according to the number
required in the plan of production. The machinery of the unit is adapted
to the single casting; thus the men in the unit each perform a single
operation that is always the same. A unit consists of an overhead
railway to which at intervals are hung little platforms for the moulds.
Without going into technical details, let me say the making of the
moulds and the cores, and the packing of the cores, are done with the
work in motion on the platforms. The metal is poured at another point as
the work moves, and by the time the mould in which the metal has been
poured reaches the terminal, it is cool enough to start on its automatic
way to cleaning, machining, and assembling. And the platform is moving
around for a new load.

Take the development of the piston-rod assembly. Even under the old
plan, this operation took only three minutes and did not seem to be one
to bother about. There were two benches and twenty-eight men in all;
they assembled one hundred seventy-five pistons and rods in a nine-hour
day--which means just five seconds over three minutes each. There was no
inspection, and many of the piston and rod assemblies came back from the
motor assembling line as defective. It is a very simple operation. The
workman pushed the pin out of the piston, oiled the pin, slipped the rod
in place, put the pin through the rod and piston, tightened one screw,
and opened another screw. That was the whole operation. The foreman,
examining the operation, could not discover why it should take as much
as three minutes. He analyzed the motions with a stop-watch. He found
that four hours out of a nine-hour day were spent in walking. The
assembler did not go off anywhere, but he had to shift his feet to
gather in his materials and to push away his finished piece. In the
whole task, each man performed six operations. The foreman devised a new
plan; he split the operation into three divisions, put a slide on the
bench and three men on each side of it, and an inspector at the end.
Instead of one man performing the whole operation, one man then
performed only one third of the operation--he performed only as much as
he could do without shifting his feet. They cut down the squad from
twenty-eight to fourteen men. The former record for twenty-eight men was
one hundred seventy-five assemblies a day. Now seven men turn out
twenty-six hundred assemblies in eight hours. It is not necessary to
calculate the savings there!

Painting the rear axle assembly once gave some trouble. It used to be
dipped by hand into a tank of enamel. This required several handlings
and the services of two men. Now one man takes care of it all on a
special machine, designed and built in the factory. The man now merely
hangs the assembly on a moving chain which carries it up over the enamel
tank, two levers then thrust thimbles over the ends of the ladle shaft,
the paint tank rises six feet, immerses the axle, returns to position,
and the axle goes on to the drying oven. The whole cycle of operations
now takes just thirteen seconds.

The radiator is a complex affair and soldering it used to be a matter of
skill. There are ninety-five tubes in a radiator. Fitting and soldering
these tubes in place is by hand a long operation, requiring both skill
and patience. Now it is all done by a machine which will make twelve
hundred radiator cores in eight hours; then they are soldered in place
by being carried through a furnace by a conveyor. No tinsmith work and
so no skill are required.

We used to rivet the crank-case arms to the crank-case, using pneumatic
hammers which were supposed to be the latest development. It took six
men to hold the hammers and six men to hold the casings, and the din was
terrific. Now an automatic press operated by one man, who does nothing
else, gets through five times as much work in a day as those twelve men
did.

In the Piquette plant the cylinder casting traveled four thousand feet
in the course of finishing; now it travels only slightly over three
hundred feet.

There is no manual handling of material. There is not a single hand
operation. If a machine can be made automatic, it is made automatic. Not
a single operation is ever considered as being done in the best or
cheapest way. At that, only about ten per cent. of our tools are
special; the others are regular machines adjusted to the particular job.
And they are placed almost side by side. We put more machinery per
square foot of floor space than any other factory in the world--every
foot of space not used carries an overhead expense. We want none of that
waste. Yet there is all the room needed--no man has too much room and no
man has too little room. Dividing and subdividing operations, keeping
the work in motion--those are the keynotes of production. But also it is
to be remembered that all the parts are designed so that they can be
most easily made. And the saving? Although the comparison is not quite
fair, it is startling. If at our present rate of production we employed
the same number of men per car that we did when we began in 1903--and
those men were only for assembly--we should to-day require a force of
more than two hundred thousand. We have less than fifty thousand men on
automobile production at our highest point of around four thousand cars
a day!




CHAPTER VI

MACHINES AND MEN


That which one has to fight hardest against in bringing together a large
number of people to do work is excess organization and consequent red
tape. To my mind there is no bent of mind more dangerous than that which
is sometimes described as the "genius for organization." This usually
results in the birth of a great big chart showing, after the fashion of
a family tree, how authority ramifies. The tree is heavy with nice round
berries, each of which bears the name of a man or of an office. Every
man has a title and certain duties which are strictly limited by the
circumference of his berry.

If a straw boss wants to say something to the general superintendent,
his message has to go through the sub-foreman, the foreman, the
department head, and all the assistant superintendents, before, in the
course of time, it reaches the general superintendent. Probably by that
time what he wanted to talk about is already history. It takes about six
weeks for the message of a man living in a berry on the lower left-hand
corner of the chart to reach the president or chairman of the board, and
if it ever does reach one of these august officials, it has by that time
gathered to itself about a pound of criticisms, suggestions, and
comments. Very few things are ever taken under "official consideration"
until long after the time when they actually ought to have been done.
The buck is passed to and fro and all responsibility is dodged by
individuals--following the lazy notion that two heads are better than
one.

Now a business, in my way of thinking, is not a machine. It is a
collection of people who are brought together to do work and not to
write letters to one another. It is not necessary for any one department
to know what any other department is doing. If a man is doing his work
he will not have time to take up any other work. It is the business of
those who plan the entire work to see that all of the departments are
working properly toward the same end. It is not necessary to have
meetings to establish good feeling between individuals or departments.
It is not necessary for people to love each other in order to work
together. Too much good fellowship may indeed be a very bad thing, for
it may lead to one man trying to cover up the faults of another. That is
bad for both men.

When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought
to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two. The sole object
ought to be to get the work done and to get paid for it. When the work
is done, then the play can come, but not before. And so the Ford
factories and enterprises have no organization, no specific duties
attaching to any position, no line of succession or of authority, very
few titles, and no conferences. We have only the clerical help that is
absolutely required; we have no elaborate records of any kind, and
consequently no red tape.

We make the individual responsibility complete. The workman is
absolutely responsible for his work. The straw boss is responsible for
the workmen under him. The foreman is responsible for his group. The
department head is responsible for the department. The general
superintendent is responsible for the whole factory. Every man has to
know what is going on in his sphere. I say "general superintendent."
There is no such formal title. One man is in charge of the factory and
has been for years. He has two men with him, who, without in any way
having their duties defined, have taken particular sections of the work
to themselves. With them are about half a dozen other men in the nature
of assistants, but without specific duties. They have all made jobs for
themselves--but there are no limits to their jobs. They just work in
where they best fit. One man chases stock and shortages. Another has
grabbed inspection, and so on.

This may seem haphazard, but it is not. A group of men, wholly intent
upon getting work done, have no difficulty in seeing that the work is
done. They do not get into trouble about the limits of authority,
because they are not thinking of titles. If they had offices and all
that, they would shortly be giving up their time to office work and to
wondering why did they not have a better office than some other fellow.

Because there are no titles and no limits of authority, there is no
question of red tape or going over a man's head. Any workman can go to
anybody, and so established has become this custom, that a foreman does
not get sore if a workman goes over him and directly to the head of the
factory. The workman rarely ever does so, because a foreman knows as
well as he knows his own name that if he has been unjust it will be very
quickly found out, and he shall no longer be a foreman. One of the
things that we will not tolerate is injustice of any kind. The moment a
man starts to swell with authority he is discovered, and he goes out, or
goes back to a machine. A large amount of labour unrest comes from the
unjust exercise of authority by those in subordinate positions, and I am
afraid that in far too many manufacturing institutions it is really not
possible for a workman to get a square deal.

The work and the work alone controls us. That is one of the reasons why
we have no titles. Most men can swing a job, but they are floored by a
title. The effect of a title is very peculiar. It has been used too much
as a sign of emancipation from work. It is almost equivalent to a badge
bearing the legend:

"This man has nothing to do but regard himself as important and all
others as inferior."

Not only is a title often injurious to the wearer, but it has its effect
on others as well. There is perhaps no greater single source of personal
dissatisfaction among men than the fact that the title-bearers are not
always the real leaders. Everybody acknowledges a real leader--a man who
is fit to plan and command. And when you find a real leader who bears a
title, you will have to inquire of someone else what his title is. He
doesn't boast about it.

Titles in business have been greatly overdone and business has suffered.
One of the bad features is the division of responsibility according to
titles, which goes so far as to amount to a removal altogether of
responsibility. Where responsibility is broken up into many small bits
and divided among many departments, each department under its own
titular head, who in turn is surrounded by a group bearing their nice
sub-titles, it is difficult to find any one who really feels
responsible. Everyone knows what "passing the buck" means. The game must
have originated in industrial organizations where the departments simply
shove responsibility along. The health of every organization depends on
every member--whatever his place--feeling that everything that happens
to come to his notice relating to the welfare of the business is his own
job. Railroads have gone to the devil under the eyes of departments that
say:

"Oh, that doesn't come under our department. Department X, 100 miles
away, has that in charge."

There used to be a lot of advice given to officials not to hide behind
their titles. The very necessity for the advice showed a condition that
needed more than advice to correct it. And the correction is just
this--abolish the titles. A few may be legally necessary; a few may be
useful in directing the public how to do business with the concern, but
for the rest the best rule is simple: "Get rid of them."

As a matter of fact, the record of business in general just now is such
as to detract very much from the value of titles. No one would boast of
being president of a bankrupt bank. Business on the whole has not been
so skillfully steered as to leave much margin for pride in the
steersmen. The men who bear titles now and are worth anything are
forgetting their titles and are down in the foundation of business
looking for the weak spots. They are back again in the places from which
they rose--trying to reconstruct from the bottom up. And when a man is
really at work, he needs no title. His work honours him.

All of our people come into the factory or the offices through the
employment departments. As I have said, we do not hire experts--neither
do we hire men on past experiences or for any position other than the
lowest. Since we do not take a man on his past history, we do not refuse
him because of his past history. I never met a man who was thoroughly
bad. There is always some good in him--if he gets a chance. That is the
reason we do not care in the least about a man's antecedents--we do not
hire a man's history, we hire the man. If he has been in jail, that is
no reason to say that he will be in jail again. I think, on the
contrary, he is, if given a chance, very likely to make a special effort
to keep out of jail. Our employment office does not bar a man for
anything he has previously done--he is equally acceptable whether he has
been in Sing Sing or at Harvard and we do not even inquire from which
place he has graduated. All that he needs is the desire to work. If he
does not desire to work, it is very unlikely that he will apply for a
position, for it is pretty well understood that a man in the Ford plant
works.

We do not, to repeat, care what a man has been. If he has gone to
college he ought to be able to go ahead faster, but he has to start at
the bottom and prove his ability. Every man's future rests solely with
himself. There is far too much loose talk about men being unable to
obtain recognition. With us every man is fairly certain to get the exact
recognition he deserves.

Of course, there are certain factors in the desire for recognition which
must be reckoned with. The whole modern industrial system has warped the
desire so out of shape that it is now almost an obsession. There was a
time when a man's personal advancement depended entirely and immediately
upon his work, and not upon any one's favor; but nowadays it often
depends far too much upon the individual's good fortune in catching some
influential eye. That is what we have successfully fought against. Men
will work with the idea of catching somebody's eye; they will work with
the idea that if they fail to get credit for what they have done, they
might as well have done it badly or not have done it at all. Thus the
work sometimes becomes a secondary consideration. The job in hand--the
article in hand, the special kind of service in hand--turns out to be
not the principal job. The main work becomes personal advancement--a
platform from which to catch somebody's eye. This habit of making the
work secondary and the recognition primary is unfair to the work. It
makes recognition and credit the real job. And this also has an
unfortunate effect on the worker. It encourages a peculiar kind of
ambition which is neither lovely nor productive. It produces the kind of
man who imagines that by "standing in with the boss" he will get ahead.
Every shop knows this kind of man. And the worst of it is there are some
things in the present industrial system which make it appear that the
game really pays. Foremen are only human. It is natural that they should
be flattered by being made to believe that they hold the weal or woe of
workmen in their hands. It is natural, also, that being open to
flattery, their self-seeking subordinates should flatter them still more
to obtain and profit by their favor. That is why I want as little as
possible of the personal element.

It is particularly easy for any man who never knows it all to go forward
to a higher position with us. Some men will work hard but they do not
possess the capacity to think and especially to think quickly. Such men
get as far as their ability deserves. A man may, by his industry,
deserve advancement, but it cannot be possibly given him unless he also
has a certain element of leadership. This is not a dream world we are
living in. I think that every man in the shaking-down process of our
factory eventually lands about where he belongs.

We are never satisfied with the way that everything is done in any part
of the organization; we always think it ought to be done better and that
eventually it will be done better. The spirit of crowding forces the man
who has the qualities for a higher place eventually to get it. He
perhaps would not get the place if at any time the organization--which
is a word I do not like to use--became fixed, so that there would be
routine steps and dead men's shoes. But we have so few titles that a man
who ought to be doing something better than he is doing, very soon gets
to doing it--he is not restrained by the fact that there is no position
ahead of him "open"--for there are no "positions." We have no
cut-and-dried places--our best men make their places. This is easy
enough to do, for there is always work, and when you think of getting
the work done instead of finding a title to fit a man who wants to be
promoted, then there is no difficulty about promotion. The promotion
itself is not formal; the man simply finds himself doing something other
than what he was doing and getting more money.

All of our people have thus come up from the bottom. The head of the
factory started as a machinist. The man in charge of the big River Rouge
plant began as a patternmaker. Another man overseeing one of the
principal departments started as a sweeper. There is not a single man
anywhere in the factory who did not simply come in off the street.
Everything that we have developed has been done by men who have
qualified themselves with us. We fortunately did not inherit any
traditions and we are not founding any. If we have a tradition it is
this:

Everything can always be done better than it is being done.

That pressing always to do work better and faster solves nearly every
factory problem. A department gets its standing on its rate of
production. The rate of production and the cost of production are
distinct elements. The foremen and superintendents would only be wasting
time were they to keep a check on the costs in their departments. There
are certain costs--such as the rate of wages, the overhead, the price of
materials, and the like, which they could not in any way control, so
they do not bother about them. What they can control is the rate of
production in their own departments. The rating of a department is
gained by dividing the number of parts produced by the number of hands
working. Every foreman checks his own department daily--he carries the
figures always with him. The superintendent has a tabulation of all the
scores; if there is something wrong in a department the output score
shows it at once, the superintendent makes inquiries and the foreman
looks alive. A considerable part of the incentive to better methods is
directly traceable to this simple rule-of-thumb method of rating
production. The foreman need not be a cost accountant--he is no better a
foreman for being one. His charges are the machines and the human beings
in his department. When they are working at their best he has performed
his service. The rate of his production is his guide. There is no reason
for him to scatter his energies over collateral subjects.

This rating system simply forces a foreman to forget personalities--to
forget everything other than the work in hand. If he should select the
people he likes instead of the people who can best do the work, his
department record will quickly show up that fact.

There is no difficulty in picking out men. They pick themselves out
because--although one hears a great deal about the lack of opportunity
for advancement--the average workman is more interested in a steady job
than he is in advancement. Scarcely more than five per cent, of those
who work for wages, while they have the desire to receive more money,
have also the willingness to accept the additional responsibility and
the additional work which goes with the higher places. Only about
twenty-five per cent. are even willing to be straw bosses, and most of
them take that position because it carries with it more pay than working
on a machine. Men of a more mechanical turn of mind, but with no desire
for responsibility, go into the tool-making departments where they
receive considerably more pay than in production proper. But the vast
majority of men want to stay put. They want to be led. They want to have
everything done for them and to have no responsibility. Therefore, in
spite of the great mass of men, the difficulty is not to discover men to
advance, but men who are willing to be advanced.

The accepted theory is that all people are anxious for advancement, and
a great many pretty plans have been built up from that. I can only say
that we do not find that to be the case. The Americans in our employ do
want to go ahead, but they by no means do always want to go clear
through to the top. The foreigners, generally speaking, are content to
stay as straw bosses. Why all of this is, I do not know. I am giving the
facts.

As I have said, everyone in the place reserves an open mind as to the
way in which every job is being done. If there is any fixed theory--any
fixed rule--it is that no job is being done well enough. The whole
factory management is always open to suggestion, and we have an informal
suggestion system by which any workman can communicate any idea that
comes to him and get action on it.

The saving of a cent per piece may be distinctly worth while. A saving
of one cent on a part at our present rate of production represents
twelve thousand dollars a year. One cent saved on each part would amount
to millions a year. Therefore, in comparing savings, the calculations
are carried out to the thousandth part of a cent. If the new way
suggested shows a saving and the cost of making the change will pay for
itself within a reasonable time--say within three months--the change is
made practically as of course. These changes are by no means limited to
improvements which will increase production or decrease cost. A great
many--perhaps most of them--are in the line of making the work easier.
We do not want any hard, man-killing work about the place, and there is
now very little of it. And usually it so works out that adopting the way
which is easier on the men also decreases the cost. There is most
intimate connection between decency and good business. We also
investigate down to the last decimal whether it is cheaper to make or to
buy a part.

The suggestions come from everywhere. The Polish workmen seem to be the
cleverest of all of the foreigners in making them. One, who could not
speak English, indicated that if the tool in his machine were set at a
different angle it might wear longer. As it was it lasted only four or
five cuts. He was right, and a lot of money was saved in grinding.
Another Pole, running a drill press, rigged up a little fixture to save
handling the part after drilling. That was adopted generally and a
considerable saving resulted. The men often try out little attachments
of their own because, concentrating on one thing, they can, if they have
a mind that way, usually devise some improvement. The cleanliness of a
man's machine also--although cleaning a machine is no part of his
duty--is usually an indication of his intelligence.

Here are some of the suggestions: A proposal that castings be taken from
the foundry to the machine shop on an overhead conveyor saved seventy
men in the transport division. There used to be seventeen men--and this
was when production was smaller--taking the burrs off gears, and it was
a hard, nasty job. A man roughly sketched a special machine. His idea
was worked out and the machine built. Now four men have several times
the output of the seventeen men--and have no hard work at all to do.
Changing from a solid to a welded rod in one part of the chassis
effected an immediate saving of about one half million a year on a
smaller than the present-day production. Making certain tubes out of
flat sheets instead of drawing them in the usual way effected another
enormous saving.

The old method of making a certain gear comprised four operations and 12
per cent. of the steel went into scrap. We use most of our scrap and
eventually we will use it all, but that is no reason for not cutting
down on scrap--the mere fact that all waste is not a dead loss is no
excuse for permitting waste. One of the workmen devised a very simple
new method for making this gear in which the scrap was only one per
cent. Again, the camshaft has to have heat treatment in order to make
the surface hard; the cam shafts always came out of the heat-treat oven
somewhat warped, and even back in 1918, we employed 37 men just to
straighten the shafts. Several of our men experimented for about a year
and finally worked out a new form of oven in which the shafts could not
warp. In 1921, with the production much larger than in 1918, we employed
only eight men in the whole operation.

And then there is the pressing to take away the necessity for skill in
any job done by any one. The old-time tool hardener was an expert. He
had to judge the heating temperatures. It was a hit-or-miss operation.
The wonder is that he hit so often. The heat treatment in the hardening
of steel is highly important--providing one knows exactly the right heat
to apply. That cannot be known by rule-of-thumb. It has to be measured.
We introduced a system by which the man at the furnace has nothing at
all to do with the heat. He does not see the pyrometer--the instrument
which registers the temperature. Coloured electric lights give him his
signals.

None of our machines is ever built haphazardly. The idea is investigated
in detail before a move is made. Sometimes wooden models are constructed
or again the parts are drawn to full size on a blackboard. We are not
bound by precedent but we leave nothing to luck, and we have yet to
build a machine that will not do the work for which it was designed.
About ninety per cent. of all experiments have been successful.

Whatever expertness in fabrication that has developed has been due to
men. I think that if men are unhampered and they know that they are
serving, they will always put all of mind and will into even the most
trivial of tasks.




CHAPTER VII

THE TERROR OF THE MACHINE


Repetitive labour--the doing of one thing over and over again and always
in the same way--is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It
is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and
day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of
minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. In fact, to some types of
mind thought is absolutely appalling. To them the ideal job is one where
the creative instinct need not be expressed. The jobs where it is
necessary to put in mind as well as muscle have very few takers--we
always need men who like a job because it is difficult. The average
worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to put
forth much physical exertion--above all, he wants a job in which he does
not have to think. Those who have what might be called the creative type
of mind and who thoroughly abhor monotony are apt to imagine that all
other minds are similarly restless and therefore to extend quite
unwanted sympathy to the labouring man who day in and day out performs
almost exactly the same operation.

When you come right down to it, most jobs are repetitive. A business man
has a routine that he follows with great exactness; the work of a bank
president is nearly all routine; the work of under officers and clerks
in a bank is purely routine. Indeed, for most purposes and most people,
it is necessary to establish something in the way of a routine and to
make most motions purely repetitive--otherwise the individual will not
get enough done to be able to live off his own exertions. There is no
reason why any one with a creative mind should be at a monotonous job,
for everywhere the need for creative men is pressing. There will never
be a dearth of places for skilled people, but we have to recognize that
the will to be skilled is not general. And even if the will be present,
then the courage to go through with the training is absent. One cannot
become skilled by mere wishing.

There are far too many assumptions about what human nature ought to be
and not enough research into what it is. Take the assumption that
creative work can be undertaken only in the realm of vision. We speak of
creative "artists" in music, painting, and the other arts. We seemingly
limit the creative functions to productions that may be hung on gallery
walls, or played in concert halls, or otherwise displayed where idle and
fastidious people gather to admire each other's culture. But if a man
wants a field for vital creative work, let him come where he is dealing
with higher laws than those of sound, or line, or colour; let him come
where he may deal with the laws of personality. We want artists in
industrial relationship. We want masters in industrial method--both from
the standpoint of the producer and the product. We want those who can
mould the political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and
shapely whole. We have limited the creative faculty too much and have
used it for too trivial ends. We want men who can create the working
design for all that is right and good and desirable in our life. Good
intentions plus well-thought-out working designs can be put into
practice and can be made to succeed. It is possible to increase the
well-being of the workingman--not by having him do less work, but by
aiding him to do more. If the world will give its attention and interest
and energy to the making of plans that will profit the other fellow as
he is, then such plans can be established on a practical working basis.
Such plans will endure--and they will be far the most profitable both in
human and financial values. What this generation needs is a deep faith,
a profound conviction in the practicability of righteousness, justice,
and humanity in industry. If we cannot have these qualities, then we
were better off without industry. Indeed, if we cannot get those
qualities, the days of industry are numbered. But we can get them. We
are getting them.

If a man cannot earn his keep without the aid of machinery, is it
benefiting him to withhold that machinery because attendance upon it may
be monotonous? And let him starve? Or is it better to put him in the way
of a good living? Is a man the happier for starving? If he is the
happier for using a machine to less than its capacity, is he happier for
producing less than he might and consequently getting less than his
share of the world's goods in exchange?

I have not been able to discover that repetitive labour injures a man in
any way. I have been told by parlour experts that repetitive labour is
soul--as well as body--destroying, but that has not been the result of
our investigations. There was one case of a man who all day long did
little but step on a treadle release. He thought that the motion was
making him one-sided; the medical examination did not show that he had
been affected but, of course, he was changed to another job that used a
different set of muscles. In a few weeks he asked for his old job again.
It would seem reasonable to imagine that going through the same set of
motions daily for eight hours would produce an abnormal body, but we
have never had a case of it. We shift men whenever they ask to be
shifted and we should like regularly to change them--that would be
entirely feasible if only the men would have it that way. They do not
like changes which they do not themselves suggest. Some of the
operations are undoubtedly monotonous--so monotonous that it seems
scarcely possible that any man would care to continue long at the same
job. Probably the most monotonous task in the whole factory is one in
which a man picks up a gear with a steel hook, shakes it in a vat of
oil, then turns it into a basket. The motion never varies. The gears
come to him always in exactly the same place, he gives each one the same
number of shakes, and he drops it into a basket which is always in the
same place. No muscular energy is required, no intelligence is required.
He does little more than wave his hands gently to and fro--the steel rod
is so light. Yet the man on that job has been doing it for eight solid
years. He has saved and invested his money until now he has about forty
thousand dollars--and he stubbornly resists every attempt to force him
into a better job!

The most thorough research has not brought out a single case of a man's
mind being twisted or deadened by the work. The kind of mind that does
not like repetitive work does not have to stay in it. The work in each
department is classified according to its desirability and skill into
Classes "A," "B," and "C," each class having anywhere from ten to thirty
different operations. A man comes directly from the employment office to
"Class C." As he gets better he goes into "Class B," and so on into
"Class A," and out of "Class A" into tool making or some supervisory
capacity. It is up to him to place himself. If he stays in production it
is because he likes it.

In a previous chapter I noted that no one applying for work is refused
on account of physical condition. This policy went into effect on
January 12, 1914, at the time of setting the minimum wage at five
dollars a day and the working day at eight hours. It carried with it the
further condition that no one should be discharged on account of
physical condition, except, of course, in the case of contagious
disease. I think that if an industrial institution is to fill its whole
role, it ought to be possible for a cross-section of its employees to
show about the same proportions as a cross-section of a society in
general. We have always with us the maimed and the halt. There is a most
generous disposition to regard all of these people who are physically
incapacitated for labour as a charge on society and to support them by
charity. There are cases where I imagine that the support must be by
charity--as, for instance, an idiot. But those cases are extraordinarily
rare, and we have found it possible, among the great number of different
tasks that must be performed somewhere in the company, to find an
opening for almost any one and on the basis of production. The blind man
or cripple can, in the particular place to which he is assigned, perform
just as much work and receive exactly the same pay as a wholly
able-bodied man would. We do not prefer cripples--but we have
demonstrated that they can earn full wages.

It would be quite outside the spirit of what we are trying to do, to
take on men because they were crippled, pay them a lower wage, and be
content with a lower output. That might be directly helping the men but
it would not be helping them in the best way. The best way is always the
way by which they can be put on a productive par with able-bodied men. I
believe that there is very little occasion for charity in this
world--that is, charity in the sense of making gifts. Most certainly
business and charity cannot be combined; the purpose of a factory is to
produce, and it ill serves the community in general unless it does
produce to the utmost of its capacity. We are too ready to assume
without investigation that the full possession of faculties is a
condition requisite to the best performance of all jobs. To discover
just what was the real situation, I had all of the different jobs in the
factory classified to the kind of machine and work--whether the physical
labour involved was light, medium, or heavy; whether it were a wet or a
dry job, and if not, with what kind of fluid; whether it were clean or
dirty; near an oven or a furnace; the condition of the air; whether one
or both hands had to be used; whether the employee stood or sat down at
his work; whether it was noisy or quiet; whether it required accuracy;
whether the light was natural or artificial; the number of pieces that
had to be handled per hour; the weight of the material handled; and the
description of the strain upon the worker. It turned out at the time of
the inquiry that there were then 7,882 different jobs in the factory. Of
these, 949 were classified as heavy work requiring strong, able-bodied,
and practically physically perfect men; 3,338 required men of ordinary
physical development and strength. The remaining 3,595 jobs were
disclosed as requiring no physical exertion and could be performed by
the slightest, weakest sort of men. In fact, most of them could be
satisfactorily filled by women or older children. The lightest jobs were
again classified to discover how many of them required the use of full
faculties, and we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637
by one-legged men, 2 by armless men, 715 by one-armed men, and 10 by
blind men. Therefore, out of 7,882 kinds of jobs, 4,034--although some
of them required strength--did not require full physical capacity. That
is, developed industry can provide wage work for a higher average of
standard men than are ordinarily included in any normal community. If
the jobs in any one industry or, say, any one factory, were analyzed as
ours have been analyzed, the proportion might be very different, yet I
am quite sure that if work is sufficiently subdivided--subdivided to
the point of highest economy--there will be no dearth of places in which
the physically incapacitated can do a man's job and get a man's wage. It
is economically most wasteful to accept crippled men as charges and then
to teach them trivial tasks like the weaving of baskets or some other
form of unremunerative hand labour, in the hope, not of aiding them to
make a living, but of preventing despondency.

When a man is taken on by the Employment Department, the theory is to
put him into a job suited to his condition. If he is already at work and
he does not seem able to perform the work, or if he does not like his
work, he is given a

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